Friday, July 26, 2024

Fact-Checking the Torah -- my fellow language geeks

Me and Rachel Weisz: "YES, I am... a language geek!"

Although some of you already know that.

For the last few years I've been trying to chase down hardcopy of a specific version of Tannakh. I forget now where I first heard about it.

It's in Ladino. Fine, Internet Archive has the Ferrara Ladino edition, but it uses Latin characters.

This one is in Rashi script. It was produced in Constantinople, in a number of editions. I was looking for the 1905 edition, but the only thing being advertised was volume 2 of a two-volume set.

NEVER SAY DIE.

I was googling for it again a couple of months ago, not expecting to find anything new, and I struck gold.

Volume 1

Volume 2

The downside is that if you want to put this on your own storage, you have to download every page image, copy and paste it. Unlike the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript, which you can download as a PDF.

Rashi script is not hard to learn but then you have to realize that Ladino is based on Spanish. So having one of the Latin script versions is a good idea, and then you can type lines into Google translate for some idea of what the Ladino says. There are online resources for learning Ladino, the standard text and a website. You can also listen to programs in Ladino on Israel's Kan radio and on Radio Nacional de Espana.

So there, my fellow Bible and language geeks, is something new to errrr spend your time on.

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