This essay offers a preliminary analysis of the intonational system of the Istanbul variety of Judeo-Spanish, spoken by the last generation of speakers born in Turkey. The description is based on the analysis of pitch contours in recordings of free conversations and narratives by three native speakers. After providing some historical background, the main contours for the expression of final statements, continuing statements, emphatic statements, and interrogatives are illustrated with representative contours obtained from the recordings. Compared to many varieties of Peninsular and Latin American Spanish, there are some differences in the intonation of neutral statements among nearly all speakers. For continuing statements, Judeo-Spanish manifests additional contours.

Being used by multilingual individuals and in multilingual contexts for more than half a millennium, all present-day varieties of Judeo-Spanish show characteristics that evidence cross-linguistic influence from the respective surrounding languages. Judeo-Spanish vowel systems, for instance, often mirror specific features of the vowel systems of their contact languages. The present contribution presents a spectral and auditory analysis of unstressed vowels in a small corpus of Istanbul Judeo-Spanish semi-spontaneous speech. It is shown that some unstressed vowels display alternations that can be explained by partial transfer of vowel harmony from the surrounding language Turkish. Nonetheless, the transfer of this phonological process seems to be inhibited by the high functional load unstressed word-final vowels bear in Judeo-Spanish, i.e., the rules of Turkish vowel harmony would negatively interfere with Judeo-Spanish nominal morphology. We assume that for this reason, vowel-harmonic alternations occur only to a limited extent in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.

Judaeo-Spanish is a dialectal continuum in which three phonological systems with partial similarities are subsumed under a diasystem. Although Judaeo-Spanish shows some of the phonetic and phonological features that characterize the Ibero-Romance languages, including Peninsular and Latin American Spanish, other phenomena, resulting mostly from isolation, testify to the independent development of Judaeo-Spanish, which makes it difficult to describe Judaeo-Spanish within the Modern Spanish diasystem. This is not so much due to the expected development of inherited elements, but rather to the preservation of features that no longer exist in Spanish and the impact of lexical borrowing from the contact languages on the consonant system, leading to the development of an independent phonological diasystem. This chapter describes the phonemes of Judaeo-Spanish – paying particular attention to their distribution – and their main phonological processes, focusing on the varieties of Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

This chapter is dedicated to the description of the inflectional morphology of Judaeo-Spanish, i.e., its form-class words (lexical categories) and structure-class words (functional categories). The morphology of Judaeo-Spanish preserves, with some changes, the characteristics of Ibero-Romance languages: several grammatical functions are expressed morphologically through nominal or verbal inflectional endings, especially person, tense, and number for verbs, and gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural) for nouns. In the verbal system, tense, person, number, and mood are generally distinguished by verbal suffixes. In recent generations, the paradigms of compound verbal forms composed of the auxiliary tener and the past participle have developed secondary, mostly aspectual, meanings.

Today, people who still have some knowledge of Judaeo-Spanish are scattered around the world with virtually no social ties among them, and Judaeo-Spanish itself lacks any official status. The speaking population of all countries barely exceeds one hundred thousand, most of them being speakers with limited competence. Prior to World War I, however, Judaeo-Spanish played a major role in defining Sephardic identity. Developed in different cities of the Ottoman Empire and Northern Africa during the
two centuries following the settlement of the expellees from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century, Judaeo-Spanish arose as a pluricentric language, due to the different mix of contributing dialects in each community. Behind its apparent polymorphism, a dialect continuum – one that integrates three major regional dialects – and a range of social variation can be discerned.

La diferencia entre los ladinamientos judíos y los romanceamientos medievales traducidos de la Biblia hebrea es un tema ampliamente discutido entre los hispanistas. La función tan distinta que ambos tuvieron en las comunidades judía y cristiana constituye una explicación parcial pero legítima, si se toman en consideración los factores que preceden al surgimiento de estos textos en romance, tales como la técnica de interpretación del Texto Masorético entre los judíos y la normativa prescrita por los sabios. El objetivo de este trabajo es describir la técnica de interpretación oral de la Biblia hebrea entre los judíos españoles y sus consecuencias para los romanceamientos medievales y los ladinamientos y traducciones sefardíes impresas después de 1492. Las variadas versiones en romance y ladino del versículo 4, 21 del libro de Jueces servirán para ilustrar el asunto.