Judeo-Malayalam

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Judaeo-Malayalam
)

Judeo-Malayalam
യെഹൂദ്യമലയാളം (yehūdyamalayāḷaṃ)
מלאיאלאם יהודית (Malayalam yəhûḏîṯ)
Native toKerala, Israel
EthnicityCochin Jews
Native speakers
a few dozen (2009)[1]
Dravidian
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottologjewi1241  Jewish Malayalam
Judeo-Malayalam speaking communities in Kerala (largely historical) and Israel
(current)

Judeo-Malayalam (Malayalam: യെഹൂദ്യമലയാളം, yehūdyamalayāḷaṃ; Hebrew: מלאיאלאם יהודית, malayalam yəhūḏīṯ) is the traditional language of the Cochin Jews (also called Malabar Jews), from Kerala, in southern India, spoken today by a few dozens of people in Israel and by probably fewer than 25 in India.

Judeo-Malayalam is the only known

Telugu Jews
.)

Since it does not differ substantially in

Judeo-Arabic and Yiddish. For example, verbatim translations from Hebrew to Malayalam, archaic features of Old Malayalam, Hebrew components agglutinated to Dravidian verb and noun formations and special idiomatic usages based on its Hebrew loanwords. Due to the lack of long-term scholarship on this language variation, there is no separate designation for the language (if it can be so considered), for it to have its own language code (see also SIL and ISO 639
).

Unlike many

Jewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam is not written using the Hebrew alphabet. It does, however, like most Jewish languages, contain many Hebrew loanwords, which are regularly transliterated, as much as possible, using the Malayalam script. Like many other Jewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam also contains a number of lexical, phonological and syntactic archaisms, in this case, from the days before Malayalam became fully distinguished from Tamil
.

In spite of claims by some

Sanskrit
and Pali as a result of the long-term affiliation of Malayalam, like all the other Dravidian languages, with Pali and Sanskrit through sacred and secular Buddhist and Hindu texts.

Because the vast majority of scholarship regarding the Cochin Jews has concentrated on the ethnographic accounts in English provided by

Ben-Zvi Institute
in Jerusalem. Digital copies can be obtained for any scholar who wishes to study Judeo-Malayalam.

See also

References

  1. Hebrew University. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 26 March 2017. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian (24 May 2022). "Jewish Malayalam". Glottolog. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Archived from the original on 12 November 2022. Retrieved 11 November 2022.

Bibliography

External links