Еврейско-итальянские диалекты: история и названия

Endangered Italian derived Jewish dialect continuum

The glottonym giudeo italiano is of academic and relatively late coinage. In English, the term was first used (as Judæo Italian) by Lazaro Belleli in 1904 in the Jewish Encyclopedia, describing the languages of the Jews of Corfu. In Italian, Giuseppe Cammeo referred to a gergo giudaico italiano ('Judaico Italian jargon') in a 1909 article. That same year, Umberto Cassuto used the term giudeo italiano, in the following (here translated into English):

Historically, Italian Jews referred to their vernaculars as la`az (לעז), Hebrew for 'foreign language', 'non Hebrew language'. The Italian Jewish rite is sometimes called minhag ha lo'azim, and linguists use lo'ez as a description of words of Romance origin in Yiddish. This may be connected with the Germanic use of the word walhaz (literally, 'foreign') and derived cognates, for Romance peoples and languages and sometimes Celtic peoples and languages (as in English terms Walloons, Wallachians, and Welsh): the Italian and Sephardic Hebrew script for Torah scrolls is known in Yiddish as Velsh or Veilish. In 1587, David de Pomis used the word italiano in reference to the Italian glosses in his trilingual dictionary. The Hebrew title of the 1609 Venice Haggadah uses the word italiano or italyano (איטליאנו) for the language of Leone Modena's translation (u fitrono bi leshon iṭalyano, ופתרונו בלשון איטליאנו). Other historic descriptions are latino and volgare, both of which were commonly used in the Middle Ages to mean early Italian dialects in general, i. e. Vulgar Latin varieties. After the institution of the Ghetto forced Jewish communities throughout Italy into segregation, the term ghettaiolo was identified with local Jewish varieties of regional dialects. Another native name type is giudeesco (e. g., Judeo Florentine iodiesco; < Latin *italic=no, or an assimilation of the hiatus *giudaesco < *italic=no). The English neologism Italkian was coined in 1942 by Solomon Birnbaum, who modelled the word on the modern Hebrew adjective ית /אטלקי italki[t], 'Italian', from the Middle Hebrew adjective איטלקי (< italic=no), 'Italic' or 'Roman'.

The International Organization for Standardization language code for Judeo Italian / Italkian in the ISO 639 3 specification is ; the ISO 639 2 collective language code (for Romance languages) can also apply more generally. "Italkian" is not used by the US Library of Congress as a subject heading, nor does it figure as a reference to Judeo Italian. The authorized subject heading is "Judeo Italian language". Subheadings are:

The first Jewish communities in Italy emerged during the 2nd century BC and were Greek speaking with knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. But by 1000 AD the Jewish community in Italy had abandoned Greek and adopted early forms of Italian. During the 19th century Judeo Italian had switched from using Hebrew letters to the latin alphabet. At the same time it began to be written down to preserve the language as it declines. By 1900 30,000 people spoke the language today it is down to 250. All of the dialects of Judeo Italian except for Judeo Roman are now extinct. (even if the name can come from Judeo French and French as well). There are also several loanwords from Judeo Italian dialects in Judeo Gascon, due to the migration of a few Italian families to the Sephardi communities in Gascony during the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is also divided into two time based varieties which are Early Judeo Italian which is attested through writings made from 1200 to 1700 and Modern Judeo Italian attested from 1700 onwards. The degree of variation between Judeo Italian dialects and their base languages (Judeo Venetian and Venetian, Judeo Piedmontese and Piedmontese etc.) varies. With some like Judeo Mantuan being more divergent, others like Judeo Venetian being less divergent and some like Judeo Livornese being in the middle.