Judeo-Urdu (Urdu: یہود اردو, romanized: yahūd urdū; Hebrew: אורדו יהודית, romanized: ūrdū yehūdīt)[1] was a dialect of the Hindustani language spoken by the Baghdadi Jews in the Indian subcontinent living in the areas of Mumbai and Kolkata towards the end of the 18th century. It is a dialect that was written in the Hebrew script and found to be used for several pieces of literature, such as Inder Sabha, a copy of which is kept at the British Library.
| Judeo-Urdu | |
|---|---|
Inder Sabha in Judeo-Urdu
| |
| Native to | Indian subcontinent |
| Region | Bombay, Calcutta |
| Ethnicity | Baghdadi Jews |
| Era | 18th Century |
| |
| Hebrew script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | jude1269 |
| IETF | ur-IN-Hebr |
The Judeo-Urdu dialect was written in the Hebrew script.[2] The orthography is one of the primary reasons for this dialect being associated with Urdu, rather than HindiorHindustani, as the spelling of lemmas found in literature written in the Judeo-Urdu dialect seem to correlate with the Perso-Arab spelling.[2] For instance, Arabic loanwords which contain the letters ط would be mapped to the Hebrew equivalent ט, a pattern which is consistent with other loanwords and loan-letters.
However, when it comes to the representation of sounds found in Indo-Aryan languages, such as retroflex consonants, they were not represented by unique or modified Hebrew letters. Rather, alveolar consonants were also used to represent these sounds, as well as aspirated consonants. This could create ambiguity as some letters, like Dalet, could denote up to four different phonemes, while an unvocalised Gimel, could denote potentially up to five.[2]
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