Iskra DOBREVA, Judeo-Spanish Texts in Cyrillic Script in the Turn of 20th Century
Etudes balkaniques (Sofia) 2016 N 3
Abstract: Multilingualism and multigraphism have always been accompanying Judeo-Spanish in its development: prior to and after the Sephardic diaspora. Although traditionally all Jewish linguistic varieties apply the Hebrew script, often in non-religious writings, such as personal notes, song lyrics, business accounts, etc. the writing system of the co-territorial language is used.
The present paper detects some Balkan morpho-syntactic features, based on Judeo-Spanish letters written in the Cyrillic alphabet from the first half of the 20th century in Bulgarian towns. Balkan features are commented as resulting from the multi-centenary contact of Judeo-Spanish with co-territorial Balkan languages. Features like the use of the coordinative conjunction и ‘and’ as the logical adverb also, the loss of past agreement between the main and subordinate clause, the use of Indicative instead of Subjunctive forms in the subordinate clause, and the insertion of a particle/desemantized preposition before the infinitive or complementizer ke are commented.
Keywords: Judeo-Spanish, Morpho-Syntactic Balkanisms, Cyrillic WRITINGS, Multilingualism, Multigraphism