Teacher: Dr Peter Nahon, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France
Class Level: Advanced Beginners (reading proficiency in Hebrew alphabet and elementary knowledge in French or another Romance language required)
Class Schedule 2023-24: Tuesdays from 15:45-16:45 UK Time (you can check time-zone comparisons on sites such as this one)
Class Length: 1-term class (Trinity Term 2024) (Oxford dates of term are available on the University website)
Class Description: This class is an introduction to Judeo-Provençal and the cognate dialects historically written and spoken by the Jews of Southern France. Southern Gallo-Romance (Occitan/Provençal) documents of Jewish origin fall into two categories: (1) texts written with use of the Hebrew alphabet, which range from the 12th to the 18th century and comprise glosses as well as full-length texts of literary or liturgical nature; (2) texts in Latin letters, spanning from the 16th to the 20th century, that typically represent vernacular varieties characterized with high variation and a strong influx of Hebrew loanwords. The class will cover both corpora: with the help of research tools used in Romance dialectology, participants will be guided to develop skills to read, translate and analyse the texts lexically, morphologically and syntactically. Specificities of Judeo-Provençal in contrast with general Southern French dialects will be also studied within an historical sociolinguistic framework. A couple of sessions will deal with the related Occitan varieties spoken by the Jews in other areas of Southern France (Gascony and Nice).
-Nahon, Peter. 2020. La singularisation linguistique des juifs en Provence et en Gascogne: deux cas parallèles ou opposés? La Linguistique 56.1: 87–113.
-Nahon, Peter. 2021. Modern Judeo-Provençal as known from its sole textual testimony: Harcanot et Barcanot (critical edition and linguistic analysis). Journal of Jewish Languages 9, 1–73.
-Minervini, Laura. 2021. Judeo-Romance in Italy and France (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-French, Judeo-Occitan). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
-Ronjat, Jules. 1930–1941. Grammaire istorique [sic] des parlers provençaux modernes (4 vol.). Montpellier: Société des langues romanes.
-Strich, Adam (with G. Jochnowitz). 2015. Judeo-Occitan (Judeo-Provençal). In L. Kahn & A. D. Rubin (eds.), Handbook of Jewish languages. Leiden-Boston: Brill, pp. 517–551.
Other materials will be supplied during the course.