ladino, (d)juezmo, (d)judio, (d)judeo-espanyol is an endangered jewish language spoken by sefardi jews in communities in israel, the balkans, turkey and the americas. although historically written in rashi script (or solitreo, rashi’s cursive form) judezmo is mostly written phonetically, with latin letters.
ladino is at very precarious point in it’s history and at risk of dying, but is experiencing a revival on the internet!!
feel free to add anything you know of, and i’ll keep this updated as i find more things!
book resources
alice’s adventures in wonderland in ladino. sometimes these things tend to have kind of stilted, unnatural language (i have read the yiddish version from this same series and its not ungrammatical, just, like, uncomfortable). that being said, lots of interesting vocabulary could be learned from it!
beginners ladino by alla markova one of the only beginners textbooks of ladino, and it comes with audio. a physical copy is ridiculously expensive, but there’s a kindle edition for $30 which is a little more reasonable.
internet resources
the muestra lingua section in ladino of esefarad, a blog that’s mostly in spanish about sefardi topics. the ladino section in particular really focuses on sephardi history and culture and is very interesting.
şalom, a turkish jewish magazine, has a small section in ladino. it looks like they only post the most recent articles online (there are two articles, but they’re from this week) so check often and save articles for studying.
aki yerushalayim, an israeli ladino magazine. they also only have their most recent issue online, but they only publish twice a year so you have plenty of time to study it, and their international subscription is only $40.
diksionario de ladinokomunita is
the best online ladino dictionary i’ve seen so far. it’s still not amazing but certainly better than any of its competition and it’s a work in progress by the members of ladinokomunita.
two websites for different parts of the same group, ladinokomunita. first, their yahoo groups page, which is pretty popular, several hundred members and several posts a week. then there’s their website, where they’ve got like 10 or 15 articles about sefardi topics. these are the same people who are building the dictionary above.
a quick barebones video lesson on how to write solitreo, the cursive version of the rashi hebrew script traditionally used to write judezmo.
קול ישראל בלאדינו // kol yisrael beladino, an israel radio station’s ladino news section. not the most interesting thing in the world but can still be interesting to listen to.
After this, he also cut several benefits for workers if they don’t do at least 30 hours, which predictably means amazon has been cutting hours to below that.
I have a mute character in the story I’m writing and one of my beta readers suggested I use italics when they sign so that I don’t have to keep peppering “they signed” or “their hands flashed” throughout the piece.
But like…I always read italics in a different tone like they’re thoughts. It seems quieter than using normal quotations which makes what they say look less significant on the page than other character’s dialogue.
I really don’t think my audience needs me to use completely different punctuation around a mute character. There’s no need to act like they’re speaking a different language since their muteness isn’t a focal point in the story.
So really this reader’s comment has done the complete opposite of what they intended. Now I’m actively taking out as many of my “hands flashed” notations as possible and just writing in normal body language because, clearly, the other characters understand them and my audience doesn’t need to be coddled.
As an HOH reader and writer I can affirm that once the signing has been established it can just be treated like “said”.
You can add little things for emphasis though, like how fast or flippant a sign is given, also a lot of our “punctuation” is in facial expressions, so wild looks is kind of normal. Also messing up signs and just.. pushing them aside. Like, you mess up a fingerspell and just take both hands and shove the air in front of you to your side, people who sign eventually end up doing this for other things, like a “forget it” motion. It’s like a “wave it off” gesture.
Body language for someone who signs is a lot more animated than someone who speaks, as we use our upper body a lot in our conversations, so the act of “signing” is more than just hand signals.
Yes….yes GOOD this is the good stuff right here. I’m going to incorporate some of these ASAP ESPECIALLY the pushing the air but to clear it of your mistakes
as an hoh person who frequently writes d/Deaf characters, i completely agree with the above, especially about using facial expressions as punctuation. body language is incredibly important in sign and switching the focus to that rather than vocal tone/volume is a very, very good idea. that’s what i do in narrative and i find that it comes with ease because you can express both tone and ‘volume’ with it.
as someone who is in the d/Deaf community, reading sign language that’s treated differently than spoken word is my one thing that will make me close out of a fic and never open it again. it’s honestly sort of… disrespectful? sign language is a language. there’s no reason to not put it in quotation marks (or whatever dialogue markers you/your native language uses for spoken word). there’s no reason to put it in italics. if the reader doesn’t immediately know that someone is signing, just put that they signed it or describe how they’re signing before/after the actual dialogue.
I really don’t think my audience needs me to use completely different punctuation around a mute character. There’s no need to act like they’re speaking a different language since their muteness isn’t a focal point in the story.
^^^this is a very good way of thinking about it if you’re a hearing person. the audience does not need entirely different punctuation. regarding the whole thing about peppering in things like ‘they signed’… that’s a dialogue tag. that’s exactly what you should be doing, because you would treat spoken dialogue the same by peppering in variations of ‘they said’.
dialogue, by definition, mentions nothing about it having to be spoken. the definition of dialogue is ‘conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie’. nowhere does it say that it has to be spoken. therefore, don’t treat sign language any different from spoken word formatting-wise. there’s no reason to. and if you really, truly believe that there’s a reason to treat sign language any differently that spoken word in fic, then i suggest you take a good, hard look at it and really try to find the motivation for that reason, because there really is no good reason to do it unless you think of people in the d/Deaf community as fundamentally different than hearing people.
DID YOU REGISTER IN TEXAS VIA VOTE.ORG??? YOU MUST RE REGISTER. Do not let them suppress your vote!
Honestly in any state please any time you register, make sure you’re doing it through the proper channels (use the info on your gov sites), and once you have, double check your registration status via your own state’s government website to make sure it went through. It’s a pain in the ass but better to deal with a bit of headache now than find out the hard way when you get to the polls that something went wrong.
One of my favorite weird parallels between Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 is that in both cases, the leader of the powerful alien empire aligned with the primary antagonist force, is featured in super low-budget sets. Like, it’s kind of necessary; DS9 already had more important sets that required attention (since Damar’s room appears only very briefly and is not thematically important) and Babylon 5 never had any money.
However, what’s canon is canon, my dudes. Emperor Cartagia is surrounded by sheer drapes and Pier 1 castoffs (what’s great is when he appears on Narn it’s the same set and he lampshades it like “Wow you guys did a great job making it look like my palace on Centari Prime!”) And Damar, leader of the Cardassian Union, is sleeping in a dorm room with like one shitty mirror he got on clearance at Home Goods.
In my mind, the implications are fun to think about (that Cardassians expect austerity of their leaders, as they value prestige and reputation over wealth; Centauri servants grift the shit out of their leaders by accepting large decorating contracts and then delivering garbage, but their leaders don’t realize because they have no taste). However, you just have to know that, if these were produced in modern times with some of the absurd TV budgets of today, Damar would probably have enjoyed, like, windows or something. The interpretation would be entirely different!
Also Weyoun’s all casting shade on Damar having ladies over but apparently no one was like “hey maybe Damar shouldn’t have his clothes on if he’s in bed” so like what was he doing with those ladies with all his clothes on?? Like at least G’kar had his I’ve-Been-Fuckin’ robe.
tags by @orlofsky laugh rule but also damn, on-point
The cooking one is interesting, too, because on B5 the person who liked to cook was Garibaldi and he definitely had a dedicated kitchen-kitchen even given the comparatively limited size of crew quarters on that show. I also liked his giant Daffy Duck poster, because sci-fi tends to assume that it’s the highbrow culture that will endure into the future, but why would we necessarily remember Vivaldi and forget Daffy Duck?
(I’ve actually been meaning to make a post comparing how they handled crew quarters; I don’t like to get into a competitive space between B5/DS9 but compare-and-contrast is always interesting to me because we get to see what was effective, in what way, and ask ourselves why)
Plot Designing 