Hebrew-Catalan Medieval Wedding Songs

Satirical Functions of the Hebrew Component and Other Linguistic Aspects

Datos Bibliográficos

ID17823911
AutoresIlil Baum (0009-0006-4075-575X, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen4
Número2
Páginas166-202
Fecha de publicación2016-06-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Jewish Languages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2213-4387 • E-ISSN: 2213-4638
EditorialBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/22134638-12340071
OpenAlexW2436045622
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas16

The Hebrew-Catalan documents of the Jews of medieval Catalonia have not been thoroughly analyzed thus far. The present article analyzes five unique wedding songs of the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries written in Catalan using Hebrew characters (edited in 1970 and 1974). In this study special attention is given to the humorous and satirical functions of the Hebrew component. This sophisticated use of the Hebrew component may imply more widespread oral traditions of parodic character related to the wedding ceremony among the Jews of Catalonia and the Iberian Peninsula. The notion of “Judeo-Catalan” is discussed in the framework of linguistic repertoire while demonstrating undocumented or rarely documented phonetic, semantic, and lexical features of medieval Catalan. The use of a different orthographic system allows for a written representation of the pronunciation of medieval Catalan, whereby the boundaries between the spoken and the written are blurred, creating a sort of a “written-spoken language.”

Art · Catalan · Ceremony · Fifteenth · Hebrew · Linguistics · Literature · Pronunciation · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy