I can’t believe that I’ve never posted this here–  this is a thing.   An important thing.   If you are learning Hebrew / know Hebrew, please check this out.  Let’s help this movement to grow.

Learning Jewish Languages

So, Jewish languages other than Hebrew are all endangered, and even Hebrew many of us don’t speak. So, in honor of Preservation Day, I’ve gathered a bunch of language resources, and hopefully we’ll be able to learn our heritage languages more easily, as well as Hebrew, both biblical for the Torah, and modern for trips (or flight, as necessary) to Israel.

I’ll start with a request for help from the people who DO know these languages: the website duolingo has both Yiddish and Hebrew projects that need people to help them work.  It seems like a very effective language learning site, and it would help us preserve our languages.  And if someone capable of doing so started up a Ladino project, or any of the various Judeo-Arabic languages (I apologize, I know basically nothing about them) it would be great!

Next up is My Language Exchange.  This is a very versatile site that seems mostly to be about matching up people learning each others’ languages as pen pals.  There’s a little bit more structure, but it’s only available for the biggest languages.  However, and this is a BIG plus, it has people who speak Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino all, and I’ve had trouble finding any websites that even acknowledge Ladino.

Ancient Hebrew

So, for all that I know nothing about Judeo-Arabic and little about Ladino, Ancient/Biblical Hebrew is pretty mysterious to me.  I never went to Hebrew school, so anything here is good.  Right now, the only thing I have is a couple of posts from an old, abandoned tumblr (to an extent, it’s been replaced by tumblrs like littlegoythings, returnofthejudai and jewish-privilege)

So, here’s a post about how Hebrew was written and pronounced in ancient times compared to today, and another on German’s influence on Hebrew pronunciation, that might fit better in the next section.

Modern Hebrew

Now, Modern Hebrew, being the language of an actual, geopolitically important country is the easiest to find resources for.  In addition to Rosetta Stone, which is quite expensive (though my Dad swears by it, in six months he’s reading Israeli newspapers) there’s a free site run by them, Live Mocha, which includes Hebrew.

Thanks to all the resources available, Hebrew language learning resources have already been collected.  A couple of places that do that are Omniglot, Fluent Forever, and Ecott.  And then there’s the online parts of the Hebrew programs at UT Austin and Yale.

And then there’s Surface Languages and Transparent, for just straight up language learning.

Yiddish

And now, into the Diaspora! There are tons of Diaspora languages, but not all of them have their own names.  The biggest one, though, is Judeo-German, better known now as Yiddish.  It’s been a very active language, and had a cultural golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

The Yiddish Academy collects Yiddish resources that will be helpful whatever path to learning the language you take.  For learning, there’s some traditional web courses at eTeacherYiddish, Surface Languages and Transparent.

And then, of course, there’s YiddishPop! I haven’t looked in detail at it, but YiddishPop seems to be all about learning Yiddish in a fun online environmentm, with lots of games and stuff.

Ladino

Ladino, unfortunately, doesn’t have nearly the support that Hebrew and Yiddish do.  Fortunately, while I was looking for resources, @concentratedridiculousness responded to me and made a nice big post about Ladino, though most of the resources aren’t online.

Yay for Jewish languages! A topic near and dear to my heart. Some additional resources that I’ve come across:

About Jewish Languages

The first place to start is the Jewish Languages Research Project, which has a wonderful map of Jewish languages around the world and a series of pages for each language with information, samples, and a short bibliography of academic work and the names of scholars who research that language (with entries for Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Iranian, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Tat, Juhuri, Judeo-Portuguese, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo/Ladino, Judeo-Tajik/Bukhori, Yiddish, Judeo-Malayalam, Judeo-Alsatian, Judeo-Amazigh, Judeo-Crimean Tatar, Judeo-Georgian, Judeo-Slavic, Karaim, Krimchak, Israeli Sign Language, Yiddish Sign Language, Jewish Dutch, Jewish English, Jewish Latin American Spanish, Jewish Polish, and Jewish Russian).

There’s a great chapter on Jewish languages in Steven Lowenstein’s book The Jewish Cultural Tapestry, and the overview articles of David Bunis and John Myhill in Ehrlich’s Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora, followed by some pieces on Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Jewish English. There are also some great scholarly articles about Yiddish, Judezmo, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, and Judeo-Provencal in the edited anthology Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. If you’re a university student or affiliated with an academic institution, you might have online access to the new scholarly Journal of Jewish Languages, which has a lot of interesting articles (you can see the first issue online here with articles on Judezmo, Yiddish, Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Malayalam, and Judeo-French). Academics also should have access to the magnificent Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, which has excellent and comprehensive overview articles on every dialect of Judeo-Arabic, as well as Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Malayalam, Judeo-Aramaic, and more.

In terms of specific languages:

Yiddish

So many wonderful web-based resources! The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe has so much wonderful information about Ashkenazi Jewish life, including comprehensive survey articles on Yiddish poetry, journalism, theatre, and more. In addition to the websites mentioned above, I’d note the Yiddish lessons at the Center for Yiddish Culture, and a great Yiddish dictionary online! The League for Yiddish has a Facebook page that posts Yiddish words of the week, and if you want to practice reading longer texts in Yiddish, Der Forvetz (The Daily Forward) still publishes in Yiddish, now online! And of course you can visit the Yiddish Book Center, which also has thousands of digitized books online. They have a summer Yiddish program, as does the Yiddish Farm in upstate NY. There’s also online Yiddish radio from the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture, the Boston-based Yiddish Voice, and the Yiddish Radio Project.

Judeo-Arabic

For other languages, unfortunately, there is much less. In my own field, modern Judeo-Arabic, there are almost no resources, online or otherwise; most people I know in the field just studied Arabic and Hebrew separately, and then began working with Judeo-Arabic texts. There is not even yet a fully-published modern Judeo-Arabic dictionary, although there is of course Joshua Blau’s superb (but expensive) Dictionary of Medieval Judeo-Arabic Texts. Thankfully there is at least plenty of primary Judeo-Arabic text available online to practice: Alan Corré has a wonderful collection online at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee of modern Judeo-Arabic texts in the original and translation, and if you’re looking for classical Judeo-Arabic you can break your teeth on Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishnah, his responsa, his Guide for the Perplexed [Dalalat al-Ha’irin], Yehuda haLevi’s The Kuzari, or Sa’adia Gaon’s translation of the Torah, the tafsir, as preserved by Yemenite Jews. There are some stories in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic here transliterated in Latin characters and translated into French, and in this post I link to half a dozen Judeo-Arabic haggadot from North Africa and Iraq available online. There’s also some good secondary literature online: I would start with Hava Lazarus-Yafeh’s overview of Judeo-Arabic literature in the Encyclopedia Judaica, and Scheindlin’s article on Judeo-Arabic in Mizrahi Jewish life; there are plenty of interesting articles on academia.edu on the subject and in the bibliographies here and here (and of course there’s Blanc’s classic monograph Communal Dialects in Baghdad). And finally, of course, there is so much Judeo-Arabic music online, both historic and modern! I would start with Chris Silver’s blog, Jewish Morocco, on Moroccan Jewish music, the Maqam Project, Tuning Baghdad, and check out contemporary Judeo-Arabic musicians like Neta Alkayam, A-Wa (the Haim sisters), Yemen Blues, and so many more…

Ladino

I don’t know as much about Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, but I know that there are textbooks (here and here), an English-Ladino dictionary and a Hebrew-Ladino dictionary, online forums here and here, and online courses here, here, and here. There’s tons of material online through the Sephardic Studies program at the University of Washington, including a video on how to write Soletreo (the Ladino handwritten script) and the Sephardic Studies Digital Library and Museum. There’s also the Digital Ladino Library from the Sephardic Studies program at Stanford. The Voces de Haquetia website is devoted specifically to the Moroccan dialect of Judeo-Spanish, and there’s also lots of material at eSefarad and Aki Yerushalayim. Apparently there are Ladino radio stations as well, here and here, and of course there is so much wonderful Ladino music being performed around the world.

Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Aramaic

I know even less about other Jewish languages… The Endangered Language Project has some pages on Judeo-Persian dialects, including Bukhori, Juhuri, and Judeo-Median, with some information, samples, and bibliography. There were online Bukhori lessons here but the page seems to have gone down. For Judeo-Aramaic, there are, amazingly, several Judeo-Aramaic dictionaries/grammars that have been recorded from different Kurdish Jewish communities (Zakho, Amadiyya, Dihok, Koye, etc.), mostly from the tireless work of Yona Sabar and his students; see here, here, here, and here.

Jewish English?

And finally, there’s some interesting work being done on “Jewish English” by Sarah Bunin Benor, including her book Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language of Orthodox Judaism and her Survey of American Jewish Language which resulted in the ongoing project of the Jewish English Lexicon.

I’m sure there are more resources out there! These are just things I’ve encountered personally or heard of from colleagues (and having studied with several of the people cited here). Feel free to add more! And if you want more information or are looking for resources on a specific Jewish language not covered here, I’m glad to be of service however I can.

My friend just sent this to me and said “you will appreciate this” and she was VERY correct

Christians: We can still hear its voice Hebrew language: QUIT TELLING EVERYONE I’M DEAD!

Hebrew WAS dead, but then this guy was like “hey we shouldn’t only be speaking like French/Romanian/whatever else we should speak Hebrew because we’re Jews and that’s cool” and then he went and made Hebrew a thing again.

Just like with all revived languages, we’re not 110% sure what the original was exactly like but we’re pretty close.

(Also I’d like to let everyone know that it’s on Duolingo if you want to learn it)

Yup, thats right!

Super important to note here that a language being “dead” does NOT mean we don’t understand it, it means that language has no one who speaks it as their first language, and no words are being added to it. That actually makes dead languagea crystallize and preserve, and we understand many dead languages like that BETTER, because they are finite and limited.

As far as being not totally sure what the original was, but close, theres two aspects to that, pronunciation and vocabulary.

We AREN’T 100% sure of pronunciation of ancient Hebrew, but the pronunciations we use today arent pulled out of thin air. They were handed down through thousands of years of fluent speakers. Did a few consonants and vowels shift a little? Probably, it happens in languages all the time. Were there different dialects of Hebrew accent, like there are today? Probably, because other ancient semetic languages seem to have had multiple accents. But by comparing the different accents and dialects of Hebrew that survived with the pronunciation of closely related languages, we can strongly infer things about how ancient Hebrew sounded (and why modern Hebrew sounds like it does today).

As far as vocabulary, there are a few issues - we only have the written account and what was handed down verbally, so there were obviously some words that never were recorded, and have been lost. That’s okay, it happens in every language. Scholars think there was an entirely different grammar system for the lower class Latin speakers, but we arent totally sure what it was because they didnt record it all, by nature of being less educated. Additionally, there are things now that there just werent words for in ancient Hebrew, like computer. So we just created them based on the rules of Hebrew roots, just like how the word computer was made in English but didn’t exist in old English. Finally, theres some few words for specific nouns, things like species of bird or types of gemstone, that we just arent 100% sure about. Sometimes we know some stuff about that word - it was definitely a red gemstone, definitely a predatory bird, etc. But we arent 100% sure. Fortunately though in those instances, we have thousands of years of Mishnaic and Talmudic and Rabbinic commentary, passed down orally, which helps us fill in some of those gaps in knowledge.

Ancient and modern Hebrew are actually pretty mutually inelligable - think maodern English and Shakespeare, not modern English and Beowulf. And the language was never “lost,” being “dead” just means it was frozen in place for a bit.