Despite all the shit that happened in Bosnia last century, Jews tend to feel safe in Bosnia. One of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world (~1350) is located in our national museum[0], and our tiny Jewish community feels like this is the safest country for them[1].
In a country where Muslims are a majority (just barely, 50 point something percent), the Synagogue mentioned in the article is in dead center of the capital with absolutely no security needed.
Edited to add: Too bad they don't have basic democratic rights. According to our constitution, the minorities can't run to be one of our three presidents (yes, three)[2].
> ‘Adonaj es mi pastor. No mankare de nada’ (The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want)
Mancare in Italian is to miss/need/be lacking, and although mancar in modern Portuguese is to limp, archaic Portuguese used it in the Italian sense.
> I had to listen carefully to understand, hearing words like fazer (to do) and lavorar (to work) that sounded more like Portuguese and Italian than modern Spanish. I heard sounds like "dj" [dʒ] in the word, djente (people), “z” [z] in the word roza (rose) and “sh” [ʃ] in the word pasharo (bird) that don’t exist at all in modern European Spanish.
Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
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Not related to the article but something I always found odd: In Italian, 'morbido' means 'soft' (used to describe food, among other things), while the English 'morbid' is translated as 'macabro'. Italian etymological references say this is due to the softness of diseased muscles, and it somehow just became 'soft'. All of the other Romance languages use the term in its original meaning.
The etymology for "macabro" goes back to Arabic: "Ma qabr" means "cemetery."
I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
How do you say "you" in Ladino? Is "usted" (possibly from Arabic "ustaad") used, or do they use an Italian or Portuguese cognate?
"usted" in Spanish comes from a contraction of "vuestra merced" (your mercy, your grace), similar to "você" in Portuguese, "vostede" in Galician, and "vostè" in Catalan. It's still abbreviated as "Vd." sometimes in Spanish.
> the etymology for "macabro" goes back to Arabic: "Ma qabr" means "cemetery."
Maybe. But this is not generally agreed upon by Romance linguists. The more generally accepted etymology connects to the name of the Biblical Maccabees. The OED says:
"The Middle French word occurs first in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says ‘Je fis de Macabré la dance’: this is apparently a claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. In form the word might be a popular alteration of Old French Macabé Maccabaeus (examples of Judas Macabré(s) occur at the end of the 12th cent.): see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus for investigation of the range of forms and spellings attested in Middle French for both the present word and for words and expressions independently derived from the biblical proper name. As regards meaning, it may be connected with the late medieval liturgical dance or procession called chorea Machabaeorum in Latin (Besançon, 1453) and in Middle Dutch Makkabeusdans (15th cent.), which has been explained as arising from 2 Maccabees 7: Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch suggests also the association of the liturgical office of the dead with 2 Maccabees 12:43–6 in the Vulgate (verses 43–5 in the King James Bible) as a reason for a link between a cult of the Maccabees and the dance of the dead tradition in art and literature. In Middle French the metaphor aller a la dance De Macabré ‘to die’ is found in the 15th cent.
A less likely explanation is that Macabré was the name of the artist who painted the picture which suggested the first poem on the subject.
There is no evidence to support the theory that the word derives from Arabic maqābir, plural of maqbara cemetery (Moroccan colloquial Arabic məqāber, plural of məqebra tomb), or from Syriac meqabberēy gravediggers. For summaries of further explanations which have been advanced see Trésor de la langue française at macabre, Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus."
>I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
Regarding your note there are other examples of false friends which make for funny pairs. Italian "sinistro" is left, but in French (and from there English) "sinistre/sinister" has a completely different meaning. Now we have a similar thing between French and English: "gauche" means left in French but "Lacking grace or social polish; awkward or tactless" in English.
It's actually interesting how the left and right have such a strong figurative meaning to them, left being bad (sinister, gauche, etc...) and right being... well, righteous. It's embedded deeply in our languages.
Well "manger" is "to eat" in French and "mangiare" in Italian which apparently both come from latin "manducare" so maybe the Romanian word comes from here?
Meanwhile French "manquer" and Italian "mancare" seem to come "From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *man-ko- (“maimed in the hand”)."
Actually we still have "manchot" in modern French to mean one-armed which I always assumed came from "manche" (sleeve) but seems to actually have a different etymology.
That's all sourced from the wiktionary by the way.
The "man-ko-" term seems to confirm why, as I mentioned at the top, mancar in Portuguese came to mean to limp. To say someone is "manco" is effectively to say they're maimed in some way.
"Sleeve" in Portuguese is "manga", which in turn is also the word for mango, the fruit. The Latin "manica" meant "sleeve", while the name of the fruit originally comes from an Indian language, into English, via the Portuguese.
> Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
More italian matches:
* fazer -> fare (which is irregular and declined like the verb was "facere")
* roza -> rosa (with a [z] sounding s)
* djente -> gente (with both dj and g sounding [dʒ])
There's a passage in the introduction to one of Joseph Conrad's books, I think it's Lord Jim, where he's puzzled by a reader's reaction to the book: An Italian lady found something "morbid".
in french, "morbide" is often used indifferently for "macabre" (i guess because death is "mort"?) but according to the dictionary it means something that makes you sick (un désir morbide) or sicker than you already are
Ladino, not to be confused with Ladin (also called "Ladino" in Italian), another romance language with few speakers from southern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin_language
Mos ambezaremos un biervo en Judeo-Espanyol kada dia / Her gün bir Judeo-Espanyol kelime öğrenelim. Let’s learn a word in Judeo-Espanyol every day /Aprenderemos una palavra cada día
"[...] the language has maintained the structure of medieval Spanish and sounds more similar to some forms of Latin American Spanish than European Spanish"
I've read some Ladino and the only immediately apparent difference is the spelling and a few foreign words that have entered the language. They don't speak in formal polite form (as opposed to Latin American speakers of Spanish), so in that regard, it's closer to Castilian Spanish.
You might think reading it is enough, but last I looked into this there were some phonetic changes in both Spain and Latin America that Ladino never got.
For example, what happens to orthographic G before I or E? I think Ladino has [ʒ] there.
Does the orthographic X become [x] or is it [ʃ]? eg. How would they say Quixote, with a "sh" sound?
Many years ago I found some recordings on the internet and I think it had both of these "old" features. And maybe some new ones, there was something funky going on with nasal consonants, eg. "muestro" for "nuestro".
Yeah, this is a puzzling thing to me. The Spaniards came in and they wrote down a bunch of native Mexican place names with X being a sh sound, as it is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese. Then that sound morphed in Spain into the kh sound, like in loch. In IPA-speak that is /ʃ/ to /x/. But they brought that sound change to the Americas too. So, both sides of the ocean see that change... But not Ladino elsewhere in Europe, much closer to Spain as the crow flies.
Another similar story I heard about English is non-rhotacism in the northeastern US. The British took north america pronouncing all the Rs. Then they dropped some. Then some northeastern cities did too. At least, this was the simplistic version I heard.
Regarding that last bit, it's part of why the Original Pronunciation [1] attempts at Shakespeare are so fascinating. Modern cinema has gotten us so used to hearing Shakespeare pronounced with the contemporary non-rhotic British accents, but to my ears listening to OP versions sounds much closer to contemporary American accents. (Though it is certainly not an American accent either.)
(Another favorite part of the OP works is the discovery of "lost" puns and dirty jokes due to pronunciation shifts.)
Similarly related, there's the interesting belief/possibility that a time travelling Elizabethan-era speaker of English would feel more kinship to the sometimes maligned contemporary US Southern accent than most other contemporary English accents.
> So, both sides of the ocean see that change... But not Ladino elsewhere in Europe, much closer to Spain as the crow flies.
Guessing it was one of constant contact, the Spanish were active sailing back and forth busy looting the Americas, while the Bosnians had lost contact. In the old days, sailing was probably much more efficient than horseback across a mountainous continent. Why didn't they sail over to Croatia? Not sure, perhaps Ladinos weren't active at the coast? Also, religion probably divided them from most Spanish.
For what is worth (at least according to my high school teacher) the official pronunciation of x is still /j/; /ks/ is for loan words (extranjerismos and barbarismos).
Speaking about linguistic minorities, here in Southern Italy there are some small towns speaking ancient Albanian called "Arbëreshë" [1], they have even orthodox churches
Arbëresh isn’t "ancient Albanian". Arbëresh does retain a few early modern Albanian features that have been lost in the dialects spoken within Albania and the literary standard, but Arbëresh has undergone plenty of innovations of its own.
Related, but I learned about the Ladino language some years ago searching for music. This group was a side project with lyrics in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOFkIf__zZM
I thought the Moors were from Morocco / Mauritania (NW Africa), and Arabs are from Arabia (between NE Africa and Asia)?
I've played several games of CK2 starting in 1066 Spain, it's a real race to consolidate both the split northern Christian kingdoms and the smaller Muslim realms in the south. Marrakesh starts out small, but it's pretty good at consolidating too, and ends up being quite a problem to deal with...
In Spanish, "ladino" is an adjective, and its main meaning is "shrewd" or "sly". It's what you would call Aladdin's Jafar( http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Jafar ). I hope it's just a coincidence, but I would not be surprised to find some racism in the etymology of the word. My language has several of those.
Except that prior to 1492, there was no language known as "ladino." It was simply Spanish, and the Jews who were exiled continued to preserve the language. Does the community auto-identify with the term "ladino"? Or was this term imposed after the exile?
More accurate to say that at the time, there was no language known as "Spanish" - there were speakers of Latin dialects (including what became Spanish and Portuguese and Galician and Catalan &c.), speakers of Arabic, and speakers of Basque.
The presence of lengua castellana instead of lengua española in the title is exactly GP's point. Remember that Castile and Aragon only just entered personal union at the time! Prior to Spanish unification, Castilian and Aragonese were seen as different from each other as modern people see Spanish and Portuguese (and Aragonese is just as different from Castilian as Portuguese is).
In addition to Castilian and Aragonese, you also had, among others, the Galician language, the Asturian and Leonese languages, and of course in the once-Muslim lands not only Ladino but also Mozarabic (which parallels Ladino in a few ways: Ladino is a close relative of Castilian spoken by Jews in Muslim lands, while Mozarabic is a close relative of Aragonese spoken by Christians in Muslim lands).
Fascinating article. My chorus is doing a Hanukkah piece in Ladino for our Holiday concert. It's the second one we've done in the last few years. I think the text is harder for the native Western Spanish speakers than it is for singers like me who don't know any dialect of Spanish.
Nationalism and nation states. We live in a nationalist world. All places and all people are politically divided into nations. Nationalism is so dominant that we barely think of it as a thing.
Anyway.. ladino & it's speakers are descendants of refugees from the spanish reconquista and inquisition period. It's generally seen though a christian/muslim lens, but this isn't the only way of seeing it. It was also a rise of nationalism.
Muslim spain was part of a multi-ethnic empire. Post reconqista spain was an early form of nation state, with a national ideology. No room for minorities. Jews got the boot first, muslims followed. Refugees of an empire-to-nation-state transition.
In the Ottoman empire (where most refugees went) remained multi-ethnic. That's what empires are. This continued until the empire fell. From that point, the transition to nationalism is stark.
In what became turkey, there was no more room for Greeks or Armenians. Kurds were told to (melting pot) be Turkish. In the (many) other nation states that emerged from the ottoman empire (eg, iraq, syria), jews were effectively exiled in the mid-20th. Christians are now leaving. Cities & regions are dividing into homogenuous ethnic enclaves.
No room for minorities in an ethnic state.
Europe went through the same thing. The two wold wars moved europe from a collection of multiethnic empires to homogenuous national states.
History repeats over and over. When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer. Cultures die.
So, i'm suggesting, the reason that ladino (and 6,000 other minority languages) are dying is the absolute victory of nationalism in the 20th century. Nationalism has no room for minorities, their culture or their language. These things wither in nation states. Ladino, with its 600 years of history will die too.
It can't survive in the former ottoman empire because 90% of ladino speaking communities had to integrate or leave (just like the Spanish ultimatum that started it all). Most went to Israel, another national home, another place where ladino can't survive.
The contribution of Arabs to Spanish culture is enormous but that doesn't hide that in medieval times, almost everybody (including them) had barbaric customs.
I never said it was. Neither was the ottoman empire. Both also made formal distinctions between people based on religion. European empires weren't equal or peaceful either.
What I did say was that they were multi-ethnic. Even with all the pogroms, jizra and other forms of discrimination, numerous minorities existed. Empires were multi ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and such.
When those empires gave way to modern nation states (or earlier precusurs, like Spain and Portugal), multiculturalism died. This is the story of the 20th century.
The process is still ongoing, particularly in ex-ottoman states..
There are arguably good and bad things about empires. Multiculturalism^ is a trait of empires. Groups like the spharadim, small communities with their own customs, beliefs and language, exist because empires existed.
Btw... this is not new. King Cyrus, Alexander & Genghis Khan's Empires are notably remembered for their multiculturalism.
^Real multiculturalism. I don't hate melting pot migration, but I don't count it as multiculturalism.
Just to add to this, actually Ottoman Empire's parliament had more representation for minorities than the current parliament of Turkey which is a funny fact. Despite this, conditions were already bad for minorities as you mentioned. Look at the Turkish Parliament now, Kurdish representation is constantly being oppressed, there is almost no representation for other minorities such as Christians, Armenians.
I completely agree with you but just for the sake of completeness, there is one Armenian MP in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garo_Paylan This doesn't change much though since MP representation/population ratio is ridiculous, and the whole system is corrupt (and biased against minorities) anyway.
Spain is not a particularly great example; I'd categorize it very much as an evolution of the preceding feudal traditions. The country was born out of a marriage alliance between Castile and Aragon, and familial ties continued to govern a significant chunk of Spain's foreign policy throughout the early modern era, whether that is marriages into Portugal, into the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, or the French Bourbons, or the whole confusing mess of Italian adventures with Naples et al. Spanish national identity still carries a lot of these fractures from the medieval regions that were never melded completely together - Basque and Catalonian autonomy movements are the prime example.
The late 1400s was very far away from Nationalism. You are thinking of the early 1800s. The first truly Nationalist state was France under Napolean or some would say the USA, but even earlier USA barely held itself together for the first 20 years.
No, he's onto something. Don't let popular understanding and terminology blind you, what we're looking at here is the shift from war as the primary driver of polity creation to what we now call popular sovereignty. This shift would have taken hundreds of years and Christianity would have been a huge driver.
Agrarian empires like the Roman one were absolutely massive, juggernauts that just couldn't be stopped. Yet the Middle Ages were a period of small, warring nations, with comparatively much smaller empires arising. Warfare slowly civilized to the point where the common people barely felt the sting.
The peace of Westphalia took place in 1648, creating the notion of an international system law that was bigger than the individual agreements penned between states.
The Napoleonic France of the 1800s represented a sharp break from this world, almost a repeat of the old juggernauts.
What caused empire to stop working and the polities to get ever smaller? I think the answer belongs in what your parent was getting at, people coalesced into ethnic communities and just wouldn't participate in the building of empire anymore. So existing empires broke up and nation-states arose.
Philip Bobbitt would argue that it was in large part different kinds of wars.
The classic 20th C nation-state went hand-in-hand with 20th-C warfare: it needed both massive industry, and every single man. The Ottomans and other relics of earlier times fell apart under the stress of such wars; the states that survived were those with a strong identity. Such identities were partly fostered for this very purpose.
But we seem to have moved on from this, war is again a profession of a few (plus high-tech weapons), conscripting the millions would be of no use. And in parallel our ties to nations are weaker than before, both whether we'd fight for the flag & conversely whether the country is interested in safety nets etc. Our economy is also much less nation-based: GM in its heyday was quite unlike Apple. He calls this emerging form a "market state".
Earlier forms also fought very different wars, he argues that Westphalia (and Waterloo) were among a series of such transitions, each entailing changes to what states are legitimate, and what kind of wars they fight.
Anyway if this sounds interesting then his book "The Shield of Achilles" is cautiously recommended. Someone really needs to write a condensed version... but if you're willing to skip a bit, the ideas are great.
I'm not sure about a shift from war, (though maybe this happens also).
I'm not really sure what drives it, honestly. I'm just talking observationally, about what kind of polities ended up emerging, however they emerged.
We are now living in an era of near absolute nationalism. Polity & nation are nearly synonyms for our generation.
I agree with the criticism that 14th-15th century Spain was not really a national state, but (like you) I think that the distinction is mostly a matter of convention. I'm calling it a proto-nation state.
The emerging Spanish language, culture, and pre-existing religious identity became a core part of what Spain is. Minority languages, customs and religions became a (literal and metaphorical) heresy. They were eventually all given the same ultimatuum as the Jews (again, metaphorically and literally), assimilate into the mainstream religion, language and culture or leave.
I think we are speaking at different levels, sort of. Jews (later Muslims) were given an actual, literal choice. For other groups/languages/whatnot it was "metaphorical."
Some of these processes are literal decrees, banning practices, languages or people. Some are less legible, like "soft power" in modern terms. I'm interested in the long term results, which was (in the case of Spain early on, and many/most places subsequently) a decisive change from multiculturalism (like the sephardi community of Bosnia represents) to national monoculturalism.
That is, over the centuries societal pressures and dynamics were such that a more monolithic identity succeeded a patchwork of language, dialect and culture.
My argument (I suspect we disagree) is that Spain was an earlier example of something that happened widely in the 19th, 20th and is still ongoing: Nation states emerging from empires and advancing towards cultural homogeneity, to the detriment of multiculturalism which existed under most empires.
When Turkey "emerged" this involved a similar process, expulsion (and worse) of Armenians & Greeks, and conformity pressure on other minorities.
A similar thing happened in Poland, which was barely more than 50% polish speaking catholic when my grandmother was born there, and is 9X% polish catholic now.
When Ireland emerged from Britain, migrations and border gerrymandering ensured "Irish Catholic" homegeneity.
To an extent. The US still has territories that were conquered in previous wars that have not been integrated. Puerto Rico is the biggest example, maybe, though there are other smaller ones.
I think you view is too simplistic.
I've talked with Albanian friends about the persecutions/humiliations endured during the ottoman domination. They mentioned catholic people who had to live in the mountains, far from the rivers and in absolute poverty to keep their religion.
Let's also not forget the genocidal behavior of the ottoman empire against the Lebanese Christians, the Serbs and the Greeks (mostly in the 19th century).
I think you might be misunderstanding me. I'm not claiming that empires (or the ottoman empire specifically) was good, or that persecutions didn't hapoen. All sorts of awful ethnic persecutions happened within empires. American slavery was initially a British imperial institution. The word pogrom comes from the Russian empire.
But, it is also true that empires tended to be pluralistic, in that different cultures lived within them for very long periods. Nation states value cultural cohesion and national homogeneity, and pluralism has, in many cases, ceased when nations succeeded empires politically.
Compare nearly any central or austrian european capital in 1900 or 2000. They became far more homogeneous. Take ottoman cities (Cairo, Istanbul, bagdad...), pluralism reversed. It some cases (eg Istanbul), it receded fast and hard. In others, it took longer.
Well my point was that some nations were victim of genocide and disappeared under the ottoman empire. So the culture of the minority was under constant assault there
> When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer.
The very creation of those empires was a violent subjugation of nations through carnage and pillaging. But who cares about their suffering that lasted for centuries as long as we have muh multi-ethnic caliphate, right?
Consider this (sort of paraphrasing Yuval Noah Harari).
Nations are abstract. They don't weep. They don't bleed. They don't suffer. Neither do Empires. These are metaphors.
People are subjigated, not nations. They can be equally subjugated by empires or nations, whichever happens to be in charge.
Wherever you happen to live, it's probably a nation state.
There were good and bad things about both. Im not suggesting a return to empires. I am just encouraging people to notice that nationalism and nation states is not The Natural And Eternal Way Of Things. It's a template we squeezed the entire world into over the last 100 years.
One side effect of this has been an end to millennia of multiculturalism, often bloody. Europe needed genocide (eg Jews), mass forced migrations (eg Germany) and forced cultural conversions (eg Netherlands, Belgium..) before they arrived at ethnically homogeneous parcels of land.
Turkey did this too. Genocide for Armenians, forced migration for Greeks, cultural conversions therapy for Kurds and arabs.
Syria & Iraq are dividing into ethnicly homogeneous regions. If your ethnicity (eg yazidi, Greek, aramean..) Is too small for an enclave, you are probably leaving the region or converting.
The ladino speakers of Bosnia are a remnant of the multicultural legacy of the ottoman empire.
> Nations are abstract. They don't weep. They don't bleed. They don't suffer. Neither do Empires. These are metaphors.
I was not referring to a nation as political abstract but as a group of people sharing common descent/history/culture/language, inhabiting a particular territory. They do suffer, bleed and weep.
> One side effect of this has been an end to millennia of multiculturalism, often bloody.
You seem to be operating on the premise that caliphates were peaceful multicultural, almost utopian, societies. They weren't. All kinds of crimes against the subjugated people were the norm. And it's not just the massacres, slavery, and the usually stuff but also bizarre practices like the blood tax practiced by the Ottoman empire (young Christian boys taken from their families, converted to Islam, trained into Janissaries, and sent back to kill their own people)
As for Syria/Iraq, it wasn't any pretty under Ottoman rule. Perhaps a quote from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad describing Damascus massacre can help paint the picture.
They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the 'infidel dogs.' The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus!
You are speaking as though the improvements in life expectancy today require the loss of ethnic diversity which just plain isn't true. I doubt anyone would really want to live in the past, but that doesn't mean that everything we have today is strictly better.
Nations as a concept didn't exist when those empires were founded. And it's really a trade off. Within the boundaries of the empire you had peace and prosperity. It was on the frontiers that people suffered.
> Nations as a concept didn't exist when those empires were founded
Nations as in "a group of people united by common descent, history, culture, and language, inhabiting a particular state or territory" most certainly did exist.
> Within the boundaries of the empire you had peace and prosperity.
Then you don't know much (or anything) about the life of people conquered by caliphates.
Especially when one empire replaces another. Just look at the history of the Near East. The Akkadian empire replaced by the Assyrian empire, replaced by the Neo-Assyrian empire, replaced by the Neo-Babylonian empire, replaced by the Persian empire, replaced by the Greek "empire", replaced by the Roman empire, replaced by the Palmyrene empire, eventually replaced by the Ottoman empire. Each replacement was of course violent and caused massive societal upheavals.
Somehow this article managed to discuss the status of a post-Holocaust European Jewish community without once mentioning Israel - where the largest community of Ladino speakers live, and where public radio has regular broadcasts in Ladino.
If Sephardi Jews who take up the Spanish Law of Return don't seem attached to Ladino, it's because they're a self-selected group who have decided not to take up the more famous Law of Return.
While there is a bit of Ladino media in Israel, overall among the Ladino community immigration to Israel has been seen as the death of the language, because there is pressure there to assimilate to the Hebrew mainstream. (This is analogous to the death of Yiddish in many contexts that it had prewar, because all those Yiddish speakers switched to Hebrew after migrating to Israel, except for the Haredim who do not use Yiddish outside their own narrow contexts.)
Because Ladino speakers remain an Other in the European diaspora and can therefore draw on more minority-language support, etc., they have a way to maintain their identity that they would not have if they made aliyah.
The Haredim speak Yiddish, but they no longer use Yiddish in the whole range of social contexts that prewar Jews did. There was a vibrant prewar Yiddish film and theatre scene, for example, but the Haredim today aren’t interested in that kind of thing, to put it mildly. As a cultural language in Israel, Yiddish is dead, and Hebrew has taken its place.
Despite all the shit that happened in Bosnia last century, Jews tend to feel safe in Bosnia. One of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world (~1350) is located in our national museum[0], and our tiny Jewish community feels like this is the safest country for them[1].
In a country where Muslims are a majority (just barely, 50 point something percent), the Synagogue mentioned in the article is in dead center of the capital with absolutely no security needed.
Edited to add: Too bad they don't have basic democratic rights. According to our constitution, the minorities can't run to be one of our three presidents (yes, three)[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-why-saraj... (paywalled original, I've read non-paywalled Bosnian translations).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejdi%C4%87_and_Finci_v._Bosni...
> ‘Adonaj es mi pastor. No mankare de nada’ (The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want)
Mancare in Italian is to miss/need/be lacking, and although mancar in modern Portuguese is to limp, archaic Portuguese used it in the Italian sense.
> I had to listen carefully to understand, hearing words like fazer (to do) and lavorar (to work) that sounded more like Portuguese and Italian than modern Spanish. I heard sounds like "dj" [dʒ] in the word, djente (people), “z” [z] in the word roza (rose) and “sh” [ʃ] in the word pasharo (bird) that don’t exist at all in modern European Spanish.
Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
____
Not related to the article but something I always found odd: In Italian, 'morbido' means 'soft' (used to describe food, among other things), while the English 'morbid' is translated as 'macabro'. Italian etymological references say this is due to the softness of diseased muscles, and it somehow just became 'soft'. All of the other Romance languages use the term in its original meaning.
The etymology for "macabro" goes back to Arabic: "Ma qabr" means "cemetery."
I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
How do you say "you" in Ladino? Is "usted" (possibly from Arabic "ustaad") used, or do they use an Italian or Portuguese cognate?
"usted" in Spanish comes from a contraction of "vuestra merced" (your mercy, your grace), similar to "você" in Portuguese, "vostede" in Galician, and "vostè" in Catalan. It's still abbreviated as "Vd." sometimes in Spanish.
> the etymology for "macabro" goes back to Arabic: "Ma qabr" means "cemetery."
Maybe. But this is not generally agreed upon by Romance linguists. The more generally accepted etymology connects to the name of the Biblical Maccabees. The OED says:
"The Middle French word occurs first in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says ‘Je fis de Macabré la dance’: this is apparently a claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. In form the word might be a popular alteration of Old French Macabé Maccabaeus (examples of Judas Macabré(s) occur at the end of the 12th cent.): see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus for investigation of the range of forms and spellings attested in Middle French for both the present word and for words and expressions independently derived from the biblical proper name. As regards meaning, it may be connected with the late medieval liturgical dance or procession called chorea Machabaeorum in Latin (Besançon, 1453) and in Middle Dutch Makkabeusdans (15th cent.), which has been explained as arising from 2 Maccabees 7: Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch suggests also the association of the liturgical office of the dead with 2 Maccabees 12:43–6 in the Vulgate (verses 43–5 in the King James Bible) as a reason for a link between a cult of the Maccabees and the dance of the dead tradition in art and literature. In Middle French the metaphor aller a la dance De Macabré ‘to die’ is found in the 15th cent.
A less likely explanation is that Macabré was the name of the artist who painted the picture which suggested the first poem on the subject.
There is no evidence to support the theory that the word derives from Arabic maqābir, plural of maqbara cemetery (Moroccan colloquial Arabic məqāber, plural of məqebra tomb), or from Syriac meqabberēy gravediggers. For summaries of further explanations which have been advanced see Trésor de la langue française at macabre, Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus."
>I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
You might enjoy, as I did, this explanation of why X is the unknown quantity in Algebra: another case where "sh" got marked as 'x' which is pronounced the same as 'j'. https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_why_is_x_the_unknown
It's a bit of a just-so-story without much in the way of evidence though though, so there's a rebuttal here https://gizmodo.com/why-we-use-x-as-the-unknown-in-math-1657...
Regarding your note there are other examples of false friends which make for funny pairs. Italian "sinistro" is left, but in French (and from there English) "sinistre/sinister" has a completely different meaning. Now we have a similar thing between French and English: "gauche" means left in French but "Lacking grace or social polish; awkward or tactless" in English.
It's actually interesting how the left and right have such a strong figurative meaning to them, left being bad (sinister, gauche, etc...) and right being... well, righteous. It's embedded deeply in our languages.
I think it's a case of chicken or the egg. At some point it becomes hard to tell which came first.
There are a few possible explanations here, regarding sinister:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sinister#etymonline_v_23561
> Mancare in Italian is to miss/need/be lacking, and although mancar in modern Portuguese is to limp
French also uses “manquer”, and there are traces in spanish (such as a manco being a person that lacks an arm).
In romanian, a more isolated romance language, "mancare" means food and "a manca" is to eat.
Well "manger" is "to eat" in French and "mangiare" in Italian which apparently both come from latin "manducare" so maybe the Romanian word comes from here?
Meanwhile French "manquer" and Italian "mancare" seem to come "From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *man-ko- (“maimed in the hand”)."
Actually we still have "manchot" in modern French to mean one-armed which I always assumed came from "manche" (sleeve) but seems to actually have a different etymology.
That's all sourced from the wiktionary by the way.
The "man-ko-" term seems to confirm why, as I mentioned at the top, mancar in Portuguese came to mean to limp. To say someone is "manco" is effectively to say they're maimed in some way.
"Sleeve" in Portuguese is "manga", which in turn is also the word for mango, the fruit. The Latin "manica" meant "sleeve", while the name of the fruit originally comes from an Indian language, into English, via the Portuguese.
Etymology is quite the rabbit hole!
In Italian "monco" means missing an arm, which comes very close to it
In Catalan too. Mancar. https://mdlc.iec.cat/results.asp?txtEntrada=mancar&operEntra...
And English manky.
> Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
More italian matches:
* fazer -> fare (which is irregular and declined like the verb was "facere") * roza -> rosa (with a [z] sounding s) * djente -> gente (with both dj and g sounding [dʒ])
There's a passage in the introduction to one of Joseph Conrad's books, I think it's Lord Jim, where he's puzzled by a reader's reaction to the book: An Italian lady found something "morbid".
in french, "morbide" is often used indifferently for "macabre" (i guess because death is "mort"?) but according to the dictionary it means something that makes you sick (un désir morbide) or sicker than you already are
In Dutch they are used interchangeable as well.
"All of the other Romance languages use the term in its original meaning."
Nope, in (Brazillian) portuguese "mórbido" means morbid, like in english, and never means soft (suave, macio).
Correct. This is what I mean when I say original meaning.
If you want to hear how it sounds, Spanish National Radio (RNE) has a podcast in judeoespañol:
http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/emision-en-sefardi/
Ladino, not to be confused with Ladin (also called "Ladino" in Italian), another romance language with few speakers from southern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin_language
The diaspora of Sefardic jews went even to Trukey and today you can still trace it. I don't know if you access there website:
http://www.istanbulsephardiccenter.com/
But their TW account tweets a word a day and it's awesome:
https://twitter.com/sefaraditurkey
Mos ambezaremos un biervo en Judeo-Espanyol kada dia / Her gün bir Judeo-Espanyol kelime öğrenelim. Let’s learn a word in Judeo-Espanyol every day /Aprenderemos una palavra cada día
"[...] the language has maintained the structure of medieval Spanish and sounds more similar to some forms of Latin American Spanish than European Spanish"
I've read some Ladino and the only immediately apparent difference is the spelling and a few foreign words that have entered the language. They don't speak in formal polite form (as opposed to Latin American speakers of Spanish), so in that regard, it's closer to Castilian Spanish.
You might think reading it is enough, but last I looked into this there were some phonetic changes in both Spain and Latin America that Ladino never got.
For example, what happens to orthographic G before I or E? I think Ladino has [ʒ] there.
Does the orthographic X become [x] or is it [ʃ]? eg. How would they say Quixote, with a "sh" sound?
Many years ago I found some recordings on the internet and I think it had both of these "old" features. And maybe some new ones, there was something funky going on with nasal consonants, eg. "muestro" for "nuestro".
> Does the orthographic X become [x] or is it [ʃ]? eg. How would they say Quixote, with a "sh" sound?
Interesting, I once came across the original spelling of Mexico: Mejico. In Brazil today they call it "Meshy-ko."
Similarly in English, many of features that the British like to look down their noses as "Americanisms" were invented in Britain.
Yeah, this is a puzzling thing to me. The Spaniards came in and they wrote down a bunch of native Mexican place names with X being a sh sound, as it is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese. Then that sound morphed in Spain into the kh sound, like in loch. In IPA-speak that is /ʃ/ to /x/. But they brought that sound change to the Americas too. So, both sides of the ocean see that change... But not Ladino elsewhere in Europe, much closer to Spain as the crow flies.
Another similar story I heard about English is non-rhotacism in the northeastern US. The British took north america pronouncing all the Rs. Then they dropped some. Then some northeastern cities did too. At least, this was the simplistic version I heard.
Regarding that last bit, it's part of why the Original Pronunciation [1] attempts at Shakespeare are so fascinating. Modern cinema has gotten us so used to hearing Shakespeare pronounced with the contemporary non-rhotic British accents, but to my ears listening to OP versions sounds much closer to contemporary American accents. (Though it is certainly not an American accent either.)
(Another favorite part of the OP works is the discovery of "lost" puns and dirty jokes due to pronunciation shifts.)
Similarly related, there's the interesting belief/possibility that a time travelling Elizabethan-era speaker of English would feel more kinship to the sometimes maligned contemporary US Southern accent than most other contemporary English accents.
[1] http://originalpronunciation.com/
> So, both sides of the ocean see that change... But not Ladino elsewhere in Europe, much closer to Spain as the crow flies.
Guessing it was one of constant contact, the Spanish were active sailing back and forth busy looting the Americas, while the Bosnians had lost contact. In the old days, sailing was probably much more efficient than horseback across a mountainous continent. Why didn't they sail over to Croatia? Not sure, perhaps Ladinos weren't active at the coast? Also, religion probably divided them from most Spanish.
For what is worth (at least according to my high school teacher) the official pronunciation of x is still /j/; /ks/ is for loan words (extranjerismos and barbarismos).
Usted(es) is a more modern invention. Ladino does have vos, which survives in some varieties, e.g. Argentine.
We use 'vos' and 'usted' more than 'tu' in Colombia, even with my girlfriend back and forth
wow, no need to brag
yep - they also use vosotros for the plural formal, which might throw off someone just reading the text lacking that knowledge.
yeísmo is also present, which is at present just about absent in Spain, except perhaps from the older speakers in the south.
Yeismo is very much alive in Argentina and Uruguay
Speaking about linguistic minorities, here in Southern Italy there are some small towns speaking ancient Albanian called "Arbëreshë" [1], they have even orthodox churches
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arb%C3%ABresh%C3%AB_people
Arbëresh isn’t "ancient Albanian". Arbëresh does retain a few early modern Albanian features that have been lost in the dialects spoken within Albania and the literary standard, but Arbëresh has undergone plenty of innovations of its own.
Nice correction, thank you
Related, but I learned about the Ladino language some years ago searching for music. This group was a side project with lyrics in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOFkIf__zZM
> Moorish (Arab)
I thought the Moors were from Morocco / Mauritania (NW Africa), and Arabs are from Arabia (between NE Africa and Asia)?
I've played several games of CK2 starting in 1066 Spain, it's a real race to consolidate both the split northern Christian kingdoms and the smaller Muslim realms in the south. Marrakesh starts out small, but it's pretty good at consolidating too, and ends up being quite a problem to deal with...
In Spanish, "ladino" is an adjective, and its main meaning is "shrewd" or "sly". It's what you would call Aladdin's Jafar( http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Jafar ). I hope it's just a coincidence, but I would not be surprised to find some racism in the etymology of the word. My language has several of those.
Except that prior to 1492, there was no language known as "ladino." It was simply Spanish, and the Jews who were exiled continued to preserve the language. Does the community auto-identify with the term "ladino"? Or was this term imposed after the exile?
More accurate to say that at the time, there was no language known as "Spanish" - there were speakers of Latin dialects (including what became Spanish and Portuguese and Galician and Catalan &c.), speakers of Arabic, and speakers of Basque.
We are talking about 1492 here, there was already a established Spanish language
That same year this was written:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram%C3%A1tica_de_la_lengua_ca...
The presence of lengua castellana instead of lengua española in the title is exactly GP's point. Remember that Castile and Aragon only just entered personal union at the time! Prior to Spanish unification, Castilian and Aragonese were seen as different from each other as modern people see Spanish and Portuguese (and Aragonese is just as different from Castilian as Portuguese is).
In addition to Castilian and Aragonese, you also had, among others, the Galician language, the Asturian and Leonese languages, and of course in the once-Muslim lands not only Ladino but also Mozarabic (which parallels Ladino in a few ways: Ladino is a close relative of Castilian spoken by Jews in Muslim lands, while Mozarabic is a close relative of Aragonese spoken by Christians in Muslim lands).
The Spanish language is still commonly called "castellano" today.
Ladino comes from the word Latin and according to Wikipedia used to be the term for literary Spanish
Actually, it is more frequently called judeo-español (Jewish-Spanish) in Spain.
Fascinating article. My chorus is doing a Hanukkah piece in Ladino for our Holiday concert. It's the second one we've done in the last few years. I think the text is harder for the native Western Spanish speakers than it is for singers like me who don't know any dialect of Spanish.
This is slightly tagential, but bare with me...
Nationalism and nation states. We live in a nationalist world. All places and all people are politically divided into nations. Nationalism is so dominant that we barely think of it as a thing.
Anyway.. ladino & it's speakers are descendants of refugees from the spanish reconquista and inquisition period. It's generally seen though a christian/muslim lens, but this isn't the only way of seeing it. It was also a rise of nationalism.
Muslim spain was part of a multi-ethnic empire. Post reconqista spain was an early form of nation state, with a national ideology. No room for minorities. Jews got the boot first, muslims followed. Refugees of an empire-to-nation-state transition.
In the Ottoman empire (where most refugees went) remained multi-ethnic. That's what empires are. This continued until the empire fell. From that point, the transition to nationalism is stark.
In what became turkey, there was no more room for Greeks or Armenians. Kurds were told to (melting pot) be Turkish. In the (many) other nation states that emerged from the ottoman empire (eg, iraq, syria), jews were effectively exiled in the mid-20th. Christians are now leaving. Cities & regions are dividing into homogenuous ethnic enclaves.
No room for minorities in an ethnic state.
Europe went through the same thing. The two wold wars moved europe from a collection of multiethnic empires to homogenuous national states.
History repeats over and over. When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer. Cultures die.
So, i'm suggesting, the reason that ladino (and 6,000 other minority languages) are dying is the absolute victory of nationalism in the 20th century. Nationalism has no room for minorities, their culture or their language. These things wither in nation states. Ladino, with its 600 years of history will die too.
It can't survive in the former ottoman empire because 90% of ladino speaking communities had to integrate or leave (just like the Spanish ultimatum that started it all). Most went to Israel, another national home, another place where ladino can't survive.
Muslim Spain was not a peaceful place of convivence. Numerous pogroms and killings happend during that time, e.g. the Granada Massacre of 1066 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_Granada_massacre
The contribution of Arabs to Spanish culture is enormous but that doesn't hide that in medieval times, almost everybody (including them) had barbaric customs.
I never said it was. Neither was the ottoman empire. Both also made formal distinctions between people based on religion. European empires weren't equal or peaceful either.
What I did say was that they were multi-ethnic. Even with all the pogroms, jizra and other forms of discrimination, numerous minorities existed. Empires were multi ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and such.
When those empires gave way to modern nation states (or earlier precusurs, like Spain and Portugal), multiculturalism died. This is the story of the 20th century.
The process is still ongoing, particularly in ex-ottoman states..
There are arguably good and bad things about empires. Multiculturalism^ is a trait of empires. Groups like the spharadim, small communities with their own customs, beliefs and language, exist because empires existed.
Btw... this is not new. King Cyrus, Alexander & Genghis Khan's Empires are notably remembered for their multiculturalism.
^Real multiculturalism. I don't hate melting pot migration, but I don't count it as multiculturalism.
Just to add to this, actually Ottoman Empire's parliament had more representation for minorities than the current parliament of Turkey which is a funny fact. Despite this, conditions were already bad for minorities as you mentioned. Look at the Turkish Parliament now, Kurdish representation is constantly being oppressed, there is almost no representation for other minorities such as Christians, Armenians.
I completely agree with you but just for the sake of completeness, there is one Armenian MP in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garo_Paylan This doesn't change much though since MP representation/population ratio is ridiculous, and the whole system is corrupt (and biased against minorities) anyway.
Spain is not a particularly great example; I'd categorize it very much as an evolution of the preceding feudal traditions. The country was born out of a marriage alliance between Castile and Aragon, and familial ties continued to govern a significant chunk of Spain's foreign policy throughout the early modern era, whether that is marriages into Portugal, into the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, or the French Bourbons, or the whole confusing mess of Italian adventures with Naples et al. Spanish national identity still carries a lot of these fractures from the medieval regions that were never melded completely together - Basque and Catalonian autonomy movements are the prime example.
Nor Catalonia, Nor Basque Country were medieval kingdoms and indeed their nationalist resurgence started at the end of XIX century.
The late 1400s was very far away from Nationalism. You are thinking of the early 1800s. The first truly Nationalist state was France under Napolean or some would say the USA, but even earlier USA barely held itself together for the first 20 years.
No, he's onto something. Don't let popular understanding and terminology blind you, what we're looking at here is the shift from war as the primary driver of polity creation to what we now call popular sovereignty. This shift would have taken hundreds of years and Christianity would have been a huge driver.
Agrarian empires like the Roman one were absolutely massive, juggernauts that just couldn't be stopped. Yet the Middle Ages were a period of small, warring nations, with comparatively much smaller empires arising. Warfare slowly civilized to the point where the common people barely felt the sting.
The peace of Westphalia took place in 1648, creating the notion of an international system law that was bigger than the individual agreements penned between states.
The Napoleonic France of the 1800s represented a sharp break from this world, almost a repeat of the old juggernauts.
What caused empire to stop working and the polities to get ever smaller? I think the answer belongs in what your parent was getting at, people coalesced into ethnic communities and just wouldn't participate in the building of empire anymore. So existing empires broke up and nation-states arose.
Philip Bobbitt would argue that it was in large part different kinds of wars.
The classic 20th C nation-state went hand-in-hand with 20th-C warfare: it needed both massive industry, and every single man. The Ottomans and other relics of earlier times fell apart under the stress of such wars; the states that survived were those with a strong identity. Such identities were partly fostered for this very purpose.
But we seem to have moved on from this, war is again a profession of a few (plus high-tech weapons), conscripting the millions would be of no use. And in parallel our ties to nations are weaker than before, both whether we'd fight for the flag & conversely whether the country is interested in safety nets etc. Our economy is also much less nation-based: GM in its heyday was quite unlike Apple. He calls this emerging form a "market state".
Earlier forms also fought very different wars, he argues that Westphalia (and Waterloo) were among a series of such transitions, each entailing changes to what states are legitimate, and what kind of wars they fight.
Anyway if this sounds interesting then his book "The Shield of Achilles" is cautiously recommended. Someone really needs to write a condensed version... but if you're willing to skip a bit, the ideas are great.
I'm not sure about a shift from war, (though maybe this happens also).
I'm not really sure what drives it, honestly. I'm just talking observationally, about what kind of polities ended up emerging, however they emerged.
We are now living in an era of near absolute nationalism. Polity & nation are nearly synonyms for our generation.
I agree with the criticism that 14th-15th century Spain was not really a national state, but (like you) I think that the distinction is mostly a matter of convention. I'm calling it a proto-nation state.
The emerging Spanish language, culture, and pre-existing religious identity became a core part of what Spain is. Minority languages, customs and religions became a (literal and metaphorical) heresy. They were eventually all given the same ultimatuum as the Jews (again, metaphorically and literally), assimilate into the mainstream religion, language and culture or leave.
That's not true at all. In Spain no language was forbidden as was in France and Jews were expelled because
- The pressure of mendicant orders.
- The pope.
I think we are speaking at different levels, sort of. Jews (later Muslims) were given an actual, literal choice. For other groups/languages/whatnot it was "metaphorical."
Some of these processes are literal decrees, banning practices, languages or people. Some are less legible, like "soft power" in modern terms. I'm interested in the long term results, which was (in the case of Spain early on, and many/most places subsequently) a decisive change from multiculturalism (like the sephardi community of Bosnia represents) to national monoculturalism.
That is, over the centuries societal pressures and dynamics were such that a more monolithic identity succeeded a patchwork of language, dialect and culture.
My argument (I suspect we disagree) is that Spain was an earlier example of something that happened widely in the 19th, 20th and is still ongoing: Nation states emerging from empires and advancing towards cultural homogeneity, to the detriment of multiculturalism which existed under most empires.
When Turkey "emerged" this involved a similar process, expulsion (and worse) of Armenians & Greeks, and conformity pressure on other minorities.
A similar thing happened in Poland, which was barely more than 50% polish speaking catholic when my grandmother was born there, and is 9X% polish catholic now.
When Ireland emerged from Britain, migrations and border gerrymandering ensured "Irish Catholic" homegeneity.
Do you consider the United States an empire?
To an extent. The US still has territories that were conquered in previous wars that have not been integrated. Puerto Rico is the biggest example, maybe, though there are other smaller ones.
I think you view is too simplistic. I've talked with Albanian friends about the persecutions/humiliations endured during the ottoman domination. They mentioned catholic people who had to live in the mountains, far from the rivers and in absolute poverty to keep their religion. Let's also not forget the genocidal behavior of the ottoman empire against the Lebanese Christians, the Serbs and the Greeks (mostly in the 19th century).
I think you might be misunderstanding me. I'm not claiming that empires (or the ottoman empire specifically) was good, or that persecutions didn't hapoen. All sorts of awful ethnic persecutions happened within empires. American slavery was initially a British imperial institution. The word pogrom comes from the Russian empire.
But, it is also true that empires tended to be pluralistic, in that different cultures lived within them for very long periods. Nation states value cultural cohesion and national homogeneity, and pluralism has, in many cases, ceased when nations succeeded empires politically.
Compare nearly any central or austrian european capital in 1900 or 2000. They became far more homogeneous. Take ottoman cities (Cairo, Istanbul, bagdad...), pluralism reversed. It some cases (eg Istanbul), it receded fast and hard. In others, it took longer.
Well my point was that some nations were victim of genocide and disappeared under the ottoman empire. So the culture of the minority was under constant assault there
> When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer.
The very creation of those empires was a violent subjugation of nations through carnage and pillaging. But who cares about their suffering that lasted for centuries as long as we have muh multi-ethnic caliphate, right?
Please don't do flamewar here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Consider this (sort of paraphrasing Yuval Noah Harari).
Nations are abstract. They don't weep. They don't bleed. They don't suffer. Neither do Empires. These are metaphors.
People are subjigated, not nations. They can be equally subjugated by empires or nations, whichever happens to be in charge.
Wherever you happen to live, it's probably a nation state.
There were good and bad things about both. Im not suggesting a return to empires. I am just encouraging people to notice that nationalism and nation states is not The Natural And Eternal Way Of Things. It's a template we squeezed the entire world into over the last 100 years.
One side effect of this has been an end to millennia of multiculturalism, often bloody. Europe needed genocide (eg Jews), mass forced migrations (eg Germany) and forced cultural conversions (eg Netherlands, Belgium..) before they arrived at ethnically homogeneous parcels of land.
Turkey did this too. Genocide for Armenians, forced migration for Greeks, cultural conversions therapy for Kurds and arabs.
Syria & Iraq are dividing into ethnicly homogeneous regions. If your ethnicity (eg yazidi, Greek, aramean..) Is too small for an enclave, you are probably leaving the region or converting.
The ladino speakers of Bosnia are a remnant of the multicultural legacy of the ottoman empire.
> Nations are abstract. They don't weep. They don't bleed. They don't suffer. Neither do Empires. These are metaphors.
I was not referring to a nation as political abstract but as a group of people sharing common descent/history/culture/language, inhabiting a particular territory. They do suffer, bleed and weep.
> One side effect of this has been an end to millennia of multiculturalism, often bloody.
You seem to be operating on the premise that caliphates were peaceful multicultural, almost utopian, societies. They weren't. All kinds of crimes against the subjugated people were the norm. And it's not just the massacres, slavery, and the usually stuff but also bizarre practices like the blood tax practiced by the Ottoman empire (young Christian boys taken from their families, converted to Islam, trained into Janissaries, and sent back to kill their own people)
As for Syria/Iraq, it wasn't any pretty under Ottoman rule. Perhaps a quote from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad describing Damascus massacre can help paint the picture.
They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the 'infidel dogs.' The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus!
edit: typos, formatting
You are speaking as though the improvements in life expectancy today require the loss of ethnic diversity which just plain isn't true. I doubt anyone would really want to live in the past, but that doesn't mean that everything we have today is strictly better.
An interesting benefit that I've never considered before would be a medicinal advantage.
With less genetic variable, effective treatments would be stumbled upon faster, if even just through GP trial and error.
Chinese medicine man who knew his clients inside and out, etc
Nations as a concept didn't exist when those empires were founded. And it's really a trade off. Within the boundaries of the empire you had peace and prosperity. It was on the frontiers that people suffered.
> Nations as a concept didn't exist when those empires were founded
Nations as in "a group of people united by common descent, history, culture, and language, inhabiting a particular state or territory" most certainly did exist.
> Within the boundaries of the empire you had peace and prosperity.
Then you don't know much (or anything) about the life of people conquered by caliphates.
Especially when one empire replaces another. Just look at the history of the Near East. The Akkadian empire replaced by the Assyrian empire, replaced by the Neo-Assyrian empire, replaced by the Neo-Babylonian empire, replaced by the Persian empire, replaced by the Greek "empire", replaced by the Roman empire, replaced by the Palmyrene empire, eventually replaced by the Ottoman empire. Each replacement was of course violent and caused massive societal upheavals.
We already gave Jews a country, there's no need for them to suffer :')
Somehow this article managed to discuss the status of a post-Holocaust European Jewish community without once mentioning Israel - where the largest community of Ladino speakers live, and where public radio has regular broadcasts in Ladino.
If Sephardi Jews who take up the Spanish Law of Return don't seem attached to Ladino, it's because they're a self-selected group who have decided not to take up the more famous Law of Return.
While there is a bit of Ladino media in Israel, overall among the Ladino community immigration to Israel has been seen as the death of the language, because there is pressure there to assimilate to the Hebrew mainstream. (This is analogous to the death of Yiddish in many contexts that it had prewar, because all those Yiddish speakers switched to Hebrew after migrating to Israel, except for the Haredim who do not use Yiddish outside their own narrow contexts.)
Because Ladino speakers remain an Other in the European diaspora and can therefore draw on more minority-language support, etc., they have a way to maintain their identity that they would not have if they made aliyah.
The Haredim do mainly speak Yiddish. They use Hebrew only in prayer and religious study.
The Haredim speak Yiddish, but they no longer use Yiddish in the whole range of social contexts that prewar Jews did. There was a vibrant prewar Yiddish film and theatre scene, for example, but the Haredim today aren’t interested in that kind of thing, to put it mildly. As a cultural language in Israel, Yiddish is dead, and Hebrew has taken its place.
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