Judeo-Venetian dialect explained

Judeo-Venetian
Familycolor:Indo-European
Fam1:Indo-European
Fam2:Italic
Fam3:Latino-Faliscan
Fam4:Latinic
Fam5:Romance languages
Fam6:Italo-Western
Fam7:(disputed)
Fam8:Venetian
Ethnicity:Venetian Jews
Region:Venice
Extinct:20th century
Nativename:Giudeo-Veneziano
Script:Hebrew Alphabet, Latin Alphabet

Judeo-Venetian also known as Giudeo-Veneziano was a dialect of the Venetian language spoken by the Jewish community of Venice.

History

Judeo-Venetian was formed as Jews in Venice began speaking their own dialect of Venetian due to isolation from the general populace in the Venetian ghetto and influence from Hebrew. The language would go extinct at some point in the 20th century.[1]

Features

It was relatively similar to Venetian but did contains some minor differences in morphology. The 1st person plural possessive pronoun is mie instead of me, 2nd and 3rd person singular ending match.[2]

There however a larger difference in lexicon with Judeo-Venetian preserving archaisms, and introducing loanwords from Judeo-Spanish and Hebrew.

Judeo VenetianJudeo-SpanishHebrewEnglish
Zè meio lassarlo perder, nunca per lùnunca per lù!’; No staghe badar, el zé un camèaN/ADon’t bother, he is a big liar
cól ʿorèr leminò N/Aכל ערב למינוevery raven after his kind
Adonài sefatài tiftàhN/Aאדני שפתי תפתחOh my goodness/he/she has cracked all the eggs

Sources

  1. Web site: Siporin . Steve . 2001-10-24 . Venice and the Jews . 2024-09-30 . Los Angeles Times . en-US.
  2. 2018 . Modern Judeo-Italian in the Light of Italian Dialectology and Jewish Interlinguistics through Three Case Studies: Judeo-Mantuan, Judeo-Venetian, and Judeo-Livornese . Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective . 135–136 . Academia.edu.