In Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, puerko names an ordinary farm animal: the pig. The same word can also describe a person considered dirty, greedy, rude, or morally…
The small word faz carries several layers of meaning in Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino. Depending on its role in a sentence, it may refer to the face, describe a…
Judeo-Spanish vocabulary preserves distinctions that can disappear in a simple translation. Two useful examples are ladinar and meldar, verbs that may both…
Food words often preserve the routes people traveled, the markets they visited, and the communities they joined. In the vocabulary of Sephardic Jews, cheese…
Names carry the history of the communities that use them. They preserve religious memory, family relationships, local accents, and the languages people…
Bread is one of the most revealing areas of Judeo-Spanish vocabulary. It belongs to everyday life, yet its names also preserve migration routes, household…
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, preserves a rich vocabulary for measuring, locating, and remembering time. Some expressions are immediately recognizable to speakers…
At first glance, mueve and movedizo seem closely connected. They share several letters, and both may bring to mind Spanish mover, “to move.” In Judeo-Spanish,…
Thessaloniki was one of the great centers of Sephardic life after the expulsion from Iberia in 1492. Jewish refugees brought Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, to a…