The glottonym giudeo-italiano is of academic and relatively late coinage. In English, the term was first used 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 in a 1909 article. That same year, Umberto Cassuto used the term giudeo-italiano, in the following :
Other designations
Historically, Italian Jews referred to their vernaculars as la`az. 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 and derived cognates, for Romance peoples and languages and sometimes Celtic peoples and languages : 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 VeniceHaggadah uses the word italiano or italyano for the language of Leone Modena's translation.
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.
The English neologismItalkian was coined in 1942 by Solomon Birnbaum, who modelled the word on the modern Hebrew adjective ית-/אטלקי italki, 'Italian', from the Middle Hebrew adjective איטלקי, 'Italic' or 'Roman'.
Influence on Yiddish
According to some scholars, there are some Judeo-Italian loan words that have found their way into Yiddish. For example, the word in Judeo-Italian for 'synagogue' is scola, closely related to scuola, 'school'. The use of words for 'school' to mean 'synagogue' dates back to the Roman Empire. The Judeo-Italian distinction between scola and scuola parallels the Standard Yiddish distinction between shul/shil for 'synagogue' and shule for 'school'. Another example is Yiddish iente, from the Judeo-Italian yientile, as differentiated from the standard Italian gentile, meaning 'noble', 'gentleman'.
At least two Judeo-Italian varieties, based on the Salentino and Venetian languages, were also used in Corfu.
Characteristics
All of the spoken Judeo-Italian varieties used combination of Hebrew verb stems with Italian conjugations. Similarly, there are abstract nouns such as טובזה tovezza, 'goodness'. This feature is unique among Jewish languages, although there are arguably parallels in Jewish English dialect. Also common are lexical incorporations from Hebrew, particularly those applicable to daily life. Terms from other Jewish languages such as Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish were also incorporated. Bagitto, the dialect of Livorno, is particularly rich in loanwords from Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Portuguese. It was claimed by Cassuto that most Judeo-Italian dialects reflect the Italian dialect of places further to the south, due to the fact that since the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples, the general direction of Jewish migration in Italy had been northward.
Use in works and publications
One of the most accessible ways to view the Judeo-Italian language is by looking at translations of biblical texts such as the Torah and Hagiographa. For example, the Judeo-Italian language is represented in a 1716 Venetian Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book typically used during a seder, some samples of which are available online. Today, there are two locations, the Oxford Bodleian Library, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, in which many of these texts have been archived.
