UW professors give insights on the past, present, and future of Ladino By Diana Davidson – The Daily

The Sephardic Studies Program at the UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies hosted a Zoom webinar Aug. 9 featuring professors David Bunis and Devin Naar, who talked about the past, present, and future of Ladino language, studies, and culture.

David Bunis, a visiting professor at the UW in 2013–2014, is the Ladino Studies chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Bunis has dedicated over 40 years of his career to studying Ladino.

Naar started the talk by asking Bunis about his journey with Ladino, starting from his childhood.

Bunis grew up in Borough Park and moved to Sheepshead Bay, both in Brooklyn, New York, where there was a Sephardic synagogue. Bunis went to Hebrew school after school and studied Biblical Hebrew, until he started preparing for his bar mitzvah and learned Yiddish.

“I saw words, and as I started to read the Hebrew letters that I knew, I suddenly realized that I knew those words,” Bunis said. “It dawned on me that actually I knew some Yiddish and had no idea before that I even knew the language.”

Bunis then went on to describe how he had gone to visit an uncle in Brooklyn who had a rich library and found Uriel Weinreich’s “College Yiddish.” Bunis found a chapter on Jewish language, where he encountered the word “Judezmo,” and a Ladino translation of the Hebrew Bible, for the first time. That was the start of a decades-long journey into the world of the Ladino language.

A lot of previous scholarship on Ladino has situated the language in a Spanish or Hispanic studies context, “preserving the language of Cervantes, a reservoir of the Golden Age of Spain and that kind of tradition in the songs and in the refrains in the proverbs,” according to Naar. Bunis took a slightly different journey with Ladino.

“It cannot be denied that whatever we call the language certainly preserves important features of Old Spanish,” Bunis said. “The Jews, the Christians, and the Arabic-speaking Muslims in medieval Spain shared a lot.”

For one thing, they shared a phonetic system, and when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they brought that sound system with them to wherever they went, with many settling in the Ottoman Empire in what is today’s Spanish Morocco and Italy.

Other linguistic features of Ladino were acquired after the Jews left Spain, as well — most notably the Hebrew component of the language and the Hebrew written alphabet, according to Bunis.

Bunis wanted to bring a high level of linguistic scholarship to Ladino, as Weinreich and other linguists did with Yiddish. In order to understand Ladino’s development, he used proverbs that could be traced back to Hebrew sources and tracked elements that were incorporated from the surrounding cultures, primarily Turkish.

Fuente: dailyuw.com