25-03-2019, 01:56 AM
For those who may be interested in the cultural context of the Judaeo-Greek community:
Today I visited the only Romaniote (Greek Jewish) synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, on Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I tried to attach a small photo of the synagogue, but file uploading doesn't seem to be working right now.
I also saw and took a picture of a page of a book with parallel Judaeo-Greek and Hebrew text, with the Hebrew text on the right and the Judaeo-Greek text on the left. If you could see the page, if you look closely, you would notice, interestingly, that the Hebrew text has vowel diacritic dots beneath the letters, but the Judaeo-Greek text does not have any vowel diacritic dots!
If you know a little about the Hebrew script and about Greek, you might recognize the common Greek word "kai" ("and") written several times in the Judaeo-Greek text with the Hebrew letters qoph ("q", a hard uvular "k" sound) + yod (like Greek iota). Semitic scripts such as Hebrew and Syriac typically use "q" rather than "k" to transliterate the Greek "k" sound, because Semitic "q" never undergoes lenition or softening, but Semitic "k" does.
This means that Greek "kai" is represented in this text as simply "qy" in the Judaeo-Greek text in the Hebrew script. There is no representation of the "a" vowel sound in the middle of "kai" whatsoever.
Geoffrey
Today I visited the only Romaniote (Greek Jewish) synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, on Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I tried to attach a small photo of the synagogue, but file uploading doesn't seem to be working right now.
I also saw and took a picture of a page of a book with parallel Judaeo-Greek and Hebrew text, with the Hebrew text on the right and the Judaeo-Greek text on the left. If you could see the page, if you look closely, you would notice, interestingly, that the Hebrew text has vowel diacritic dots beneath the letters, but the Judaeo-Greek text does not have any vowel diacritic dots!
If you know a little about the Hebrew script and about Greek, you might recognize the common Greek word "kai" ("and") written several times in the Judaeo-Greek text with the Hebrew letters qoph ("q", a hard uvular "k" sound) + yod (like Greek iota). Semitic scripts such as Hebrew and Syriac typically use "q" rather than "k" to transliterate the Greek "k" sound, because Semitic "q" never undergoes lenition or softening, but Semitic "k" does.
This means that Greek "kai" is represented in this text as simply "qy" in the Judaeo-Greek text in the Hebrew script. There is no representation of the "a" vowel sound in the middle of "kai" whatsoever.
Geoffrey