Shuadit
| Judeo-Occitan | |
|---|---|
| Shuadit | |
| שואדית | |
| Native to | France (Provence) |
| Extinct | 1977, with the death of Armand Lunel |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | sdt |
| Glottolog | (insufficiently attested or not a distinct language)shua1252[1] |
Shuadit (also spelled Chouhadite, Chouhadit, Chouadite, Chouadit, and Shuhadit), also called Judeo-Occitan or less accurately Judaeo-Provençal or Judeo-Comtadin, is the Occitan] that was historically spoken by French Jews. It was indistinguishable from the Occitan spoken by non-Jews (Banitt 1963, Pansier 1925, Guttel & Aslanov 2006:560).[2]
Shuadit is known from documents dating to as early as the 11th century in France, and after suffering drastic declines beginning with the charter of the Inquisition in France, it finally died out after its last known speaker died in 1977.
Literature[edit]
Shuadit writings came in two distinct varieties, religious texts and popular prose, and they were written by adapting the Hebrew script.
Religious texts contained a significantly higher incidence of loanwords from Hebrews and reflectef an overall more "educated" style, with many words alsofrom Old French, Franco-Provençal, Greek, Aramaic and Latin. The texts include a fragment of a 14th-century poem lauding Queen Esther. Also, a woman's siddur. This siddur contains an uncommon blessing, found in few other locations (including medieval Lithuania), thanking God, in the morning blessings, not for making her "according to His will" (she-asani kirtzono) but for making her as a woman.
The extant texts in the collections of popular prose used far fewer borrowings and were essentially Occitan that was written with the Hebrew script, possibly indicating a Jewish preference tgen prevalent of avoiding the Latin alphabet of the oppressive Christian régimes. The texts demonstrate the extent to which the Jewish community of Provence was familiar with Hebrew as well as the extent to which the community was integrated into the larger surrounding Christian culture of the region.
Phonology[edit]
Shuadit had a number of phonological characteristics unlike all other Jewish languages. The name "Shuadit" literally means "Jewish" and is the Occitan pronunciation of the Hebrew word "Yehudit" (initial *j became /ʃ/, and *h was often elided between vowels).
In words inherited from Hebrew and Aramaic, the letters samekh, sin and thav were all pronounced /f/, the same as fe. The conjecture is that the first two /s/ phonemes merged with the /θ/ phoneme, which then merged with the phoneme /f/. That observation gives particular validity to the theory that Shuadit is an outgrowth of a much older Judaeo-Latin language, rather than an independent development within southern France, as the second step also occurred during the development of Latin from Proto-Italic.
In words derived from Latin, there was a tendency to diphthongise /l/ after plosives and to delateralize /ʎ/ to /j/. Also, both /ʒ/ and /ʃ/, as well as /dʒ/ and /tʃ/, merged to the single phoneme /ʃ/. Thus, the Provençal words plus, filho, and juge were respectively pyus, feyo, and šuše in Shuadit.
Evidence[edit]
A fundamental source for inferring information about the phonology of Shuadit is the comedy Harcanot et Barcanot. (See Pansier in the References section.)
Emperor Pedro II of Brazil recorded a number of bilingual Hebrew-Shuadit religious poems.
Decline[edit]
In 1498, French Jews were formally expelled from France. Although the community was not finally compelled to depart until 1501, much of the community had already into other regions, notably Genoa, and the underdeveloped regions of Germany. However, the Comtat Venaissin was then under the direct control of the Pope, and a small Jewish community continued to live there in relative isolation. After the French Revolution, when French Jews were permitted to live legally anywhere in France as full citizens, Shuadit began to decline rapidly. Its last known native speaker, Armand Lunel, died in 1977.
References[edit]
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Shuadit". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ^ Hammarström (2015) Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: a comprehensive review: online appendices
- Banitt, M. 1963. Une langue fantôme: le judéo-français. Revue de linguistique romane 27: 245-294.
- Blondheim, D. S. 1928. Notes étymologiques et lexicographiques. Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature offerts à M. Alfred Jeanroy par ses élèves et ses amis. Paris: Champion. 71-80.
- Jochnowitz, G. 1978 Shuadit: La langue juive de Provence. Archives juives 14: 63-67.
- Jochnowitz, G. 1981. ...Who Made Me a Woman. Commentary 71/4: 63-4.
- Jochnowitz, G. 2013. The Hebrew Component in Judeo-Provençal. In Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, ed. Geoffrey Khan et al., vol. 2, pp. xxxx. Leiden: Brill.
- Pansier, P. 1925. Une comédie en argot hébraïco-provençal de la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Revue des études juives 81: 113-145.
- Jewish Language Research website's page on Judæo-Provençal
- omniglot.com
- Pedro d'Alcantara (Dom Pedro II of Brazil). 1891. Poésies hébraïco-provençales du rituel comtadin. Avignon: Séguin Frères
- Zosa Szajkowski, Dos loshn fun di yidn in di arbe kehiles fun Komta-Venesen (The Language of the Jews in the Four Communities of Comtat Venaissin), New York, published by the author and the Yiddish Scientific Institute—YIVO, 1948.
