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Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

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Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#71

Post by WorldMaker »

asveikau wrote: post #6
mixmastamyk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

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/

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#72

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

man-and-laptop wrote: post #70
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#73

Post by emanreus »

empath75 wrote: post #46
emanreus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#74

Post by dang »

emanreus wrote: post #39
netcan wrote: post #28

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…

> 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

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#75

Post by acct1771 »

uluyol wrote: post #43
emanreus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#76

Post by amanaplanacanal »

xenihn wrote: post #58
netcan wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#77

Post by emanreus »

netcan wrote: post #48
emanreus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#78

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #74
emanreus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

[deleted]

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#79

Post by netcan »

tronko wrote: post #68
netcan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

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.

Re: Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

#80

Post by personlurking »

simias wrote: post #50
mns wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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