Talk:Jewish languages

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Contents 1 qeltu? 2 Two details 3 Yeshivish 4 Jewish Aramaic and Neo-aramaic 5 two notes 6 Two templates? 7 Jewish English? 8 Khazar Language 9 Judeo/Judæo 10 What should not be here 11 Hebrew naming conventions 12 Jewish

[edit] qeltu?

Could someone please explain somewhere what the term qeltu means? --Jpgordon 21:57, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Please review Dialects of Arabic#General varieties. Tomer^TALK 07:23, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Two details

• Does anyone mind if we put the alphabetical list first? I suspect that would be more useful to most people.
• In the writing I am familiar with, the normal spelling of many of these is Judaeo-X. I have never seen anything else in academic writing. Does anyone know why the article titles are all "Judeo-"? Dovi 04:41, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Actually they appear to be a mix, some Judaeo, some Judeo. As far as I know, Judeo is American, Judaeo is British. This site [1], for example, uses Judeo. Some quick google searches show that Judeo is more common on websites, at least. That said, they should all be one or the other. Jayjg 05:18, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The Greek suffix '-αίο', when the it belongs to the first half of a compound word, becomes '-aeo' in British and '-eo' in American English:

• Ιουδαίο- -> Judaeo- (EN-UK), Judeo- (EN-US)
• Αρχαίο- -> Archaeo- (EN-UK), Archeo- (EN-US) (ie archaeologist and archeologist)

Etz Haim 05:47, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I went through and changed all the Judeo-s to Judæo-s, for the sake of consistency. If anyone objects, please make any changes consistent throughout...including in the templates. TShilo12 04:30, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Yeshivish

Would (or should) anyone attempt to categorize Yeshivish among other Jewish languages? Etz Haim 08:35, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I believe it should. I have observed yeshiva bokhers from different areas of the country communicate and this is at least a pidgin, if not a full blown dialect, that merits attention. --Briangotts 12:44, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jewish Aramaic and Neo-aramaic

I've just completed the article on Aramaic language, and I'm wanting to expand on it. I'm wondering whether it would be useful to have an article on 'Jewish Aramaic' to discuss the features of Targumic, Midrashic, Documentary, Talmudic and other 'dialects' of Aramaic. I would also like to so an article on Neo-aramaic languages, and I'm wondering whether to do one big one on 'Jewish Neo-aramaic' or little articles for every dialect. I suppose a main article with small individual ones might be a good 'belt and braces' approach. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for this?

Gareth Hughes 17:43, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure who here has enough expertise to help you; perhaps Olve? Jayjg 18:37, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] two notes

Would someone mind adding a blurb about Yinglish if any scholarly study can be found on it, as well as substantially upgrading the Yinglish page?

Also, please see my note on the Yiddish_language talk page: "So...How many people really speak yiddish?" TShilo12 08:33, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Two templates?

Should we keep both templates, or just the "Jewish languages" one (as in Yiddish)? Hasdrubal 22:40, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've taken the bull by the horns and deleted the Jew template. Jayjg ^(talk) 22:59, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jewish English?

i've heard of jewish english, and there is an article on it on the jewish languages research site, but there doesn't appear to be one on here, and i don't know near enough about it to write an article on it. Gringo300 01:45, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

See Yeshivish and Yinglish. Tomer ^TALK 02:50, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

• those articles cover just PART of a bigger picture. Gringo300 08:49, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps, but it's the primary part. Because of the cultural influence and numeric preponderance of ashkenazim, even many sfaradim etc. end up well within the spheres of the phenomena discussed in the Yeshivish and Yinglish articles. Tomer ^TALK 23:51, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Khazar Language

another thing: i just came across a wikipedia article on the khazar language, but on this article main page it isn't on the... well, i think it's what's refered to as a "template". well, whatever it's called, shouldn't the khazar language be on there? Gringo300 01:51, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

While as many as 1/3 of the Khazars are reported to have converted to Judaism, there is no evidence that any subset of the Khazar language was significantly affected to warrant its description as a Jewish language. The second-to-last substantive sentence of the Khazar language article as much as says that the only extant inscription in this language is written in Turkic runiform, rather than in an adaptation of the Hebrew alefbet. The last sentence of the article should probably be deleted, as it seems to be purely speculative. Tomer ^TALK 02:59, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Judeo/Judæo

The "æ" grapheme is difficult to type; as our own article notes, it is "falling into disuse." This can be demonstrated through a few simple searches on Google:

Name	æ hits	Non-æ hits
"Judæo-Arabic"/"Judeo-Arabic"	12,200	13,500
"Judæo-Berber"/"Judeo-Berber"	30	531
"Judæo-Hamedani"/"Judeo-Hamedani"	2	18
"Judæo-Latin"/"Judeo-Latin"	3	68
"Judæo-Malayalam"/"Judeo-Malayalam"	6	12
"Judæo-Portuguese"/"Judeo-Portuguese"	8	101
"Judæo-Romance"/"Judeo-Romance"	15	187

To Tomer: I don't think using the most clear and easily readable rendering is "anti-scholarly," not do I think that it violates any of Wikipedia's policies. On a side note I find your outrage rather disproportionate to the situation. Hopefully we can work this out together. Keep in touch. Warmest regards --Neutrality^talk 19:08, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Uf. Your cut and paste was faster than my actually typing up my gripes. I'm not outraged, as I said, I'm just irritated that this was done without so much as a word of discussion, and as such, done so incompletely. If you have US-International kbd on your computer, æ is not even mildly difficult to type. There is no evidence presented, even by you, that -e- is "easier to read" than -æ-. Quoting a WP article claim that the ligature is "falling into disuse" is the same as Sirkumsize' quoting "Igor" (see Talk:Anti-Semitism#I am tired of your bullshit). The vast majority of linguistics research, as with pretty much everything else, is still published in printing houses with ink on paper, not on google-accessible webpages, so when it comes to brainy subjects especially, as well as for various other reasons (some of which are touched upon below) the number of google hits is pretty irrelevant. The relevant WP guidelines or policies that your unilateral undiscussed moves violate are Wikipedia:Consensus and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English. For more, please see below. Tomer ^TALK 19:39, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

I hate to say this, but see arguments on both sides. Frankly, "æ" looks more scholarly, but "e" is easier. Jayjg ^(talk) 19:41, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This was covered briefly, albeit with very little discussion, several months ago, at #Two details. User:Neutrality has, apparently using Template:Jewish language as a resource, moved 7 Jewish language articles whose names began with Judæo- to corresponding articles (overwriting redirects at each location in the process) named Judeo-, using, as justification, the number of google hits each of these names, comparatively, get, as shown in the table above, and further arguing that the assertion at æ that the grapheme is falling into disuse. While it is certainly true that the number of google hits is greater for the one than the other, the fact that there are numerous WP mirrors out there is ignored as is the fact that the vast majority of websites "out there" are neither scholarly nor encyclopedic, and additionally, the vast majority of webpages and sites in English are generated in the US by people who are either unaware or unconcerned with using ligatures, or are unfamiliar with how to set up their computers to type extended ascii. That said, my main gripe wrt Neutrality's moving these 7 articles is that the movement was done in an incredibly inconsistent and slipshod fashion. Text in the articles was not changed, there's no evidence that the moves were backchecked for redirects, and there are still articles out there that were not included in the template, named Judæo-X. My other big gripe is that I went through the work of uniformizing articles' names and texts and all the wikilinks, and extensive work writing redirects, to consistently use the ligature several months ago, after discussion, and now, bli shum davar, this is done. Tomer ^TALK 19:25, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

OK, but lets move on from Neutrality's "bold" edit, and figure out what the preferred version is going forward. Jayjg ^(talk) 19:58, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yesyesyes. If you look at the history a bit, you'll see that we both presented our cases at the same time. What I wrote above is simply the same thing I had said in its own separate section, merged with minor rewording (since I took out the table already produced in Neutrality's statement) into the section above it. Tomer ^TALK 01:59, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What should not be here

I think this sentence does not belong here, it belongs to the "Jews" page. Doesn't have too much to do with languages:

"The largest Jewish population in the world is in the United States, and there are also large, substantial communities in Canada (a majority of Canadian Jews speak English, not French), the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Ireland and New Zealand also have small English-speaking Jewish communities."

[edit] Hebrew naming conventions

Urgent: see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) to add your opinions about this important matter. Thank you. IZAK 18:13, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jewish

What is the language most associated with being called 'Jewish'? If someone said "I speak Jewish" Which language would they most likely be referring to? This is just curiosity on my part not for anything pertaining to the article. --Hellahulla 19:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Depends who you're talking to, and what period of history you're talking about. If it's an Ashkenazi he could mean Yiddish (which means "Jewish"). If it's a second-century Babylonian Jew, then probably Judaeo-Babylonian Aramaic --Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 19:23, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

If I recall it right, Ottoman Turks understood Spanish as the "Jewish language" since that is what they heard when the Sephardis of the Ottoman Empire talked. --Error 01:27, 3 March 2007 (UTC)