Yevanic, also known as Judaeo-Greek, Romaniyot,[2]Romaniote, and Yevanitika,[3] is a Greek dialect formerly used by the Romaniotes and by the Constantinopolitan Karaites (in whose case the language is called Karaitika or Karaeo-Greek).[4][5] The Romaniotes are a group of Greek Jews whose presence in the Levant is documented since the Byzantine period. Its linguistic lineage stems from the Jewish Koine spoken primarily by Hellenistic Jews throughout the region, and includes Hebrew and Aramaic elements. It was mutually intelligible with the Greek dialects of the Christian population. The Romaniotes used the Hebrew alphabet to write Greek and Yevanic texts. Judaeo-Greek has had in its history different spoken variants depending on different eras, geographical and sociocultural backgrounds. The oldest Modern Greek text was found in the Cairo Geniza and is actually a Jewish translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet).[6]
Yevanic
Romaniyot, Judaeo-Greek
יעואני גלוסא, γεβανί γλώσσαyevani glosa
Native to
Originally Greece, recently Israel, Turkey, United States
Native speakers
"A few semi-speakers left in 1987 [in Israel], and may be none now [as of 1996 or earlier]. There may be a handful of elderly speakers still in Turkey."[1]
The term Yevanic is an artificial creation from the Biblical word יון (Yāwān) referring to the Greeks and the lands that the Greeks inhabited. The term is an overextension of the Greek word Ἰωνία (Ionia in English) from the (then) easternmost Greeks to all Greeks. The word for Greece in modern Israeli Hebrew is Yavan; likewise, the word yevanit is used to refer to the modern Greek language in Hebrew.
Geographical distribution
A small number of Romaniote Jews in the United States, Israel, Greece, and Turkey have some knowledge of the Judaeo-Greek language. The language is highly endangered and could completely die out. There are no preservation programs to promote or to revive the language,[7] but starting in April, 2022, the Oxford School for Rare Jewish languages will be offering a beginner's course.[8] In 1987, there were 35 speakers left in Israel, the majority located in Jerusalem. This population may have died out.[9]
As of 2019[update], a few elderly Jews in Ioannina, Greece still speak the language.[10]
Historical background
Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor, Southern Italy, the Balkans and Eastern Europe had originally a Greek-speaking Jewish community. After the arrival of Jewish refugees into these areas from the Iberian Peninsula, Northern Italy, and Western Europe, the Greek-speaking Jewish communities began to almost disappear while integrating into the group of the newcomers, which did not constitute in every area of their new homeland the majority.[11][12][13]
The immigration of Italian and Spanish-speaking people into Greece in the late 15th century altered the culture and vernacular of the Greek Jews. A lot of locales picked up on Judeo-Spanish language and customs, however some communities in Epirus, Thessaly, the Ionian Islands, Crete, Constantinople and Asia Minor kept the old, so-called "Romaniote minhag" and the Judaeo-Greek language. By the early 20th century, the Jews living in places such as Ioannina, Arta, Preveza, and Chalkida still spoke a form of Greek that slightly differentiated the Greek of their Christian neighbors. These differences, semantically, do not go beyond phonetic, intonational, and lexical phenomena. It is different from other Jewish languages, in that there is no knowledge of any language fragmentation ever taking place.[14]
Current status
The assimilation of the Romaniote communities by the Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, the emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel, and the murder of many of the Romaniotes during the Holocaust have been the main reasons of the decline of Judaeo-Greek. The survivors were too scant to continue an environment in which this language was dominant and more recent generations of the survivors have moved to new locations such as Greece, Israel, and The United States and now speak the respective languages of those countries; Standard Modern Greek, Hebrew, and English. [15][16]
The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek. They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial vernacular which they then transcribed in Hebrew letters. The Romaniotes were Jews settled in the Eastern Roman Empire long before its division from its Western counterpart, and they were linguistically assimilated long before leaving the Levant after Hadrian's decree against them and their religion. As a consequence, they spoke Greek, the language of the overwhelming majority of the populace in the beginning of the Byzantine era and that of the Greek élite thereafter, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Some communities in Northern Greece and Crete maintained their specific Romaniote practices since these communities were either geographically apart from the Sephardim or had different synagogues, and because their liturgies differed greatly.[17][18] At the end of the 19th century, the Romaniote community of Greece made an effort to preserve the Romaniote liturgical heritage of Ioannina and Arta, by printing various liturgical texts in the Hebrew printing presses of Salonika.[19]
Literature
There is a small amount of literature in Yevanic dating from the early part of the modern period, the most extensive document being a translation of the Pentateuch. A polyglot edition of the Bible published in Constantinople in 1547 has the Hebrew text in the middle of the page, with a Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) translation on one side and a Yevanic translation on the other.[20] In its context, this exceptional cultivation of the vernacular has its analogue in the choice of Hellenistic Greek by the translators of the Septuagint and in the New Testament.[21]
^"¿Sabías que el Yevanic es una lengua clasificada como". Idiomas en peligro de extinción. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
^Wexler, P. Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages, p. 17. 2006
^Dalven, R. Judeo-Greek. In: Encyclopedia Judaica. 1971:426
^Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis. Language of Religion, Language of the People: Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, p. 31, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006
^Vlachou, Evangelia, Papadopoulou, Chrysoula, Kotzoglou, Georgios. Before the flame goes out: documentation of the Yevanic dialect. 2014. Sponsored by the Latsis Foundation.
^"Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages". Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies. Retrieved 2021-09-26.
^"Yevanic". ethnologue.com. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
^Peklaris, Achilles M. (11 June 2019). "'They Claimed I Was Connected to the Mossad': Meet Greece's First-ever Jewish Mayor". Haaretz. Retrieved 12 June 2019.
^Bowman, Steven (1985). "Language and Literature". The Jews of Byzantium 1204-1453. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. p. 758.
^"Greece's Romaniote Jews remember a catastrophe and grapple with disappearing - Jewish Telegraphic Agency". www.jta.org. April 2014. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
^Avigdor Levy; The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, New Jersey, (1994)
^"Holocaust - Jewish languages". www.projetaladin.org. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
^Bonfil, Robert (2011). Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture. Brill.
^Zunz, Leopold "Ritus. 1859. Eine Beschreibung synagogaler Riten".
^ Luzzato, S. D. Introduction to the Mahzor Bene Roma, p. 34. 1966
^The Jewish Museum of Greece, The Jewish Community of Ioannina: The Memory of Artefacts, p. 40 (Booklet). 2017
^Natalio Fernandez Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible (2000) p 180. The Greek text is published in D. C. Hesseling, Les cinq livres de la Loi (1897).
^Lockwood, W. B. 1972. "A Panorama of Indo-European Languages." Hutchinson. London.
Further reading
Balodimas-Bartolomei, Angelyn, Nicholas Alexiou. 2010. "The Inclusion of Invisible Minorities in the EU Member States: The Case of Greek Jews in Greece." In Changing Educational Landscapes, 155-182.
BimBaum, Soloman A. 1951. "The Jewries of Eastern Europe." In The Slavonic and East European Review, 29(73), 420-443.
Connerty, Mary C. Judeo-Greek: The Language, The Culture. Jay Street Publishing, 2003. ISBN1-889534-88-9
Dalven, R. Judeo-Greek. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 10, pp. 425–227, Jerusalem: Keter. 1971
Davis, Barry. 1987. "Yiddish and the Jewish Identity." In History Workshop, 23, 159-164.
Gkoumas, P. Bibliography on the Romaniote Jewry, 2016. ISBN9783741273360
Gold, David L. (1989). "A sketch of the linguistic situation in Israel today". Language in Society. 18 (3): 361–388. doi:10.1017/S0047404500013658. S2CID 143028333.
Krivoruchko, Julia G. (2011). "Judeo-Greek in the era of globalization". Language & Communication. 31 (2): 119–129. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2010.08.004.
Naveh, Joseph, Soloman Asher Bimbaum, David Diringer, Zvi Hermann Federbsh, Jonathan Shunary & Jacob Maimon. 2007. "Alphabet, Hebrew." In Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 1, pp. 689-728.
Spolsky, Bernard, Elana Goldberg Shohamy. 1999. The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology, and Practice. Multilingual Matters. UK.
Spolsky, Bernard. The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: CUP, 2014). Ch. 11, "The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy" (pp. 159–170; notes on pp. 295sq.).
External links
On Judaeo-Greek
Jewish Language Research Website: Judeo-Greek 2005-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
Yevanic Language Endangered Languages Project Website
Hebrew Writing System of Yevanic
The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism
On Karaeo-Greek
on Turkish newspaper Shalom
pdf-document
On a blog
On a blog
A recording
January 13, 2023
yevanic, language, yevanic, also, known, judaeo, greek, romaniyot, romaniote, yevanitika, greek, dialect, formerly, used, romaniotes, constantinopolitan, karaites, whose, case, language, called, karaitika, karaeo, greek, romaniotes, group, greek, jews, whose, . Yevanic also known as Judaeo Greek Romaniyot 2 Romaniote and Yevanitika 3 is a Greek dialect formerly used by the Romaniotes and by the Constantinopolitan Karaites in whose case the language is called Karaitika or Karaeo Greek 4 5 The Romaniotes are a group of Greek Jews whose presence in the Levant is documented since the Byzantine period Its linguistic lineage stems from the Jewish Koine spoken primarily by Hellenistic Jews throughout the region and includes Hebrew and Aramaic elements It was mutually intelligible with the Greek dialects of the Christian population The Romaniotes used the Hebrew alphabet to write Greek and Yevanic texts Judaeo Greek has had in its history different spoken variants depending on different eras geographical and sociocultural backgrounds The oldest Modern Greek text was found in the Cairo Geniza and is actually a Jewish translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes Kohelet 6 YevanicRomaniyot Judaeo Greekיעואני גלוסא gebani glwssa yevani glosaNative toOriginally Greece recently Israel Turkey United StatesNative speakers A few semi speakers left in 1987 in Israel and may be none now as of 1996 or earlier There may be a handful of elderly speakers still in Turkey 1 Language familyIndo European HellenicGreekAttic citation needed YevanicWriting systemHebrew alphabetGreek alphabetLanguage codesISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code yej class extiw title iso639 3 yej yej a Glottologyeva1238ELPYevanicLinguasphere56 AAA am Contents 1 Origin of name 2 Geographical distribution 3 Historical background 4 Current status 5 Literature 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External linksOrigin of name EditThe term Yevanic is an artificial creation from the Biblical word יון Yawan referring to the Greeks and the lands that the Greeks inhabited The term is an overextension of the Greek word Ἰwnia Ionia in English from the then easternmost Greeks to all Greeks The word for Greece in modern Israeli Hebrew is Yavan likewise the word yevanit is used to refer to the modern Greek language in Hebrew Geographical distribution EditA small number of Romaniote Jews in the United States Israel Greece and Turkey have some knowledge of the Judaeo Greek language The language is highly endangered and could completely die out There are no preservation programs to promote or to revive the language 7 but starting in April 2022 the Oxford School for Rare Jewish languages will be offering a beginner s course 8 In 1987 there were 35 speakers left in Israel the majority located in Jerusalem This population may have died out 9 As of 2019 update a few elderly Jews in Ioannina Greece still speak the language 10 Historical background EditGreece Constantinople Asia Minor Southern Italy the Balkans and Eastern Europe had originally a Greek speaking Jewish community After the arrival of Jewish refugees into these areas from the Iberian Peninsula Northern Italy and Western Europe the Greek speaking Jewish communities began to almost disappear while integrating into the group of the newcomers which did not constitute in every area of their new homeland the majority 11 12 13 The immigration of Italian and Spanish speaking people into Greece in the late 15th century altered the culture and vernacular of the Greek Jews A lot of locales picked up on Judeo Spanish language and customs however some communities in Epirus Thessaly the Ionian Islands Crete Constantinople and Asia Minor kept the old so called Romaniote minhag and the Judaeo Greek language By the early 20th century the Jews living in places such as Ioannina Arta Preveza and Chalkida still spoke a form of Greek that slightly differentiated the Greek of their Christian neighbors These differences semantically do not go beyond phonetic intonational and lexical phenomena It is different from other Jewish languages in that there is no knowledge of any language fragmentation ever taking place 14 Current status EditThe assimilation of the Romaniote communities by the Ladino speaking Sephardi Jews the emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel and the murder of many of the Romaniotes during the Holocaust have been the main reasons of the decline of Judaeo Greek The survivors were too scant to continue an environment in which this language was dominant and more recent generations of the survivors have moved to new locations such as Greece Israel and The United States and now speak the respective languages of those countries Standard Modern Greek Hebrew and English 15 16 The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial vernacular which they then transcribed in Hebrew letters The Romaniotes were Jews settled in the Eastern Roman Empire long before its division from its Western counterpart and they were linguistically assimilated long before leaving the Levant after Hadrian s decree against them and their religion As a consequence they spoke Greek the language of the overwhelming majority of the populace in the beginning of the Byzantine era and that of the Greek elite thereafter until the fall of the Ottoman Empire Some communities in Northern Greece and Crete maintained their specific Romaniote practices since these communities were either geographically apart from the Sephardim or had different synagogues and because their liturgies differed greatly 17 18 At the end of the 19th century the Romaniote community of Greece made an effort to preserve the Romaniote liturgical heritage of Ioannina and Arta by printing various liturgical texts in the Hebrew printing presses of Salonika 19 Literature EditThere is a small amount of literature in Yevanic dating from the early part of the modern period the most extensive document being a translation of the Pentateuch A polyglot edition of the Bible published in Constantinople in 1547 has the Hebrew text in the middle of the page with a Ladino Judaeo Spanish translation on one side and a Yevanic translation on the other 20 In its context this exceptional cultivation of the vernacular has its analogue in the choice of Hellenistic Greek by the translators of the Septuagint and in the New Testament 21 See also EditHistory of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire Jewish languagesReferences Edit Yevanic at Ethnologue 13th ed 1996 Spolsky B S B Benor 2006 Jewish Languages In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 120 124 http legacy huc edu faculty faculty benor Spolsky 20and 20Benor 20jewish languages 20offprint pdf Sabias que el Yevanic es una lengua clasificada como Idiomas en peligro de extincion Retrieved 3 April 2018 Wexler P Jewish and Non Jewish Creators of Jewish Languages p 17 2006 Dalven R Judeo Greek In Encyclopedia Judaica 1971 426 Johannes Niehoff Panagiotidis Language of Religion Language of the People Medieval Judaism Christianity and Islam p 31 Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2006 Vlachou Evangelia Papadopoulou Chrysoula Kotzoglou Georgios Before the flame goes out documentation of the Yevanic dialect 2014 Sponsored by the Latsis Foundation Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages Oxford Centre for Hebrew amp Jewish Studies Retrieved 2021 09 26 Yevanic ethnologue com Retrieved 3 April 2018 Peklaris Achilles M 11 June 2019 They Claimed I Was Connected to the Mossad Meet Greece s First ever Jewish Mayor Haaretz Retrieved 12 June 2019 Bowman Steven 1985 Language and Literature The Jews of Byzantium 1204 1453 Tuscaloosa Alabama University of Alabama Press p 758 Greece s Romaniote Jews remember a catastrophe and grapple with disappearing Jewish Telegraphic Agency www jta org April 2014 Retrieved 3 April 2018 Avigdor Levy The Jews of the Ottoman Empire New Jersey 1994 Jewish Languages Holocaust Jewish languages www projetaladin org Retrieved 3 April 2018 Bonfil Robert 2011 Jews in Byzantium Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture Brill Zunz Leopold Ritus 1859 Eine Beschreibung synagogaler Riten Luzzato S D Introduction to the Mahzor Bene Roma p 34 1966 The Jewish Museum of Greece The Jewish Community of Ioannina The Memory of Artefacts p 40 Booklet 2017 Natalio Fernandez Marcos The Septuagint in Context Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible 2000 p 180 The Greek text is published in D C Hesseling Les cinq livres de la Loi 1897 Lockwood W B 1972 A Panorama of Indo European Languages Hutchinson London Further reading EditBalodimas Bartolomei Angelyn Nicholas Alexiou 2010 The Inclusion of Invisible Minorities in the EU Member States The Case of Greek Jews in Greece In Changing Educational Landscapes 155 182 BimBaum Soloman A 1951 The Jewries of Eastern Europe In The Slavonic and East European Review 29 73 420 443 Connerty Mary C Judeo Greek The Language The Culture Jay Street Publishing 2003 ISBN 1 889534 88 9 Dalven R Judeo Greek In Encyclopaedia Judaica vol 10 pp 425 227 Jerusalem Keter 1971 Davis Barry 1987 Yiddish and the Jewish Identity In History Workshop 23 159 164 Gkoumas P Bibliography on the Romaniote Jewry 2016 ISBN 9783741273360 Gold David L 1989 A sketch of the linguistic situation in Israel today Language in Society 18 3 361 388 doi 10 1017 S0047404500013658 S2CID 143028333 Krivoruchko Julia G 2011 Judeo Greek in the era of globalization Language amp Communication 31 2 119 129 doi 10 1016 j langcom 2010 08 004 Naveh Joseph Soloman Asher Bimbaum David Diringer Zvi Hermann Federbsh Jonathan Shunary amp Jacob Maimon 2007 Alphabet Hebrew In Encyclopaedia Judaica vol 1 pp 689 728 Spolsky Bernard Elana Goldberg Shohamy 1999 The Languages of Israel Policy Ideology and Practice Multilingual Matters UK Spolsky Bernard The Languages of the Jews A Sociolinguistic History Cambridge CUP 2014 Ch 11 The Yavanic area Greece and Italy pp 159 170 notes on pp 295sq External links EditOn Judaeo Greek Jewish Language Research Website Judeo Greek Archived 2005 10 23 at the Wayback Machine Yevanic Language Endangered Languages Project Website Hebrew Writing System of Yevanic The Greek Bible in Byzantine JudaismOn Karaeo Greek on Turkish newspaper Shalom pdf document On a blog On a blog A recording Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Yevanic language amp oldid 1130864961, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
