| Abstrakt: |
Hપākām Edmond Cohen was a well-known figure in the Jewish community in Aleppo in the last decades of its existence. During the 1980’s he published pamphlets in the community about the weekly Parashah, moral issues and religious laws. His pamphlets, which were later collected in a book, are full of biblical verses that he translated into Arabic himself. Another innovation found in Cohen’s pamphlets was his use of Arabic characters as opposed to the usual Judeo-Arabic practice of using Hebrew letters. As is demonstrated in this paper, Cohen’s translations were written in a fine Modern Standard Arabic style, and show little correlation to the traditional Sharh of Aleppo or to Saadiah Gaon’s translation. In some cases, પ Cohen used phrases that are not commonly found in other Jewish Arabic Bible translations. Cohen’s translation style ranges from word-to-word translation while preserving a normative Arabic style, to somewhat free paraphrases. This paper examines his translations and the ways he chose broader project they undertook to create high-quality, distinctive and inspirational Judeo-Arabic literature. Amongst the Jewish communities in Islamic lands, Tunisia is the community that produced the most Jewish newspapers. Between 1878 and 1961, 143 Jewish newspapers and journals were published in Tunisia: 79 were written in Judeo-Arabic, 48 in French, and 16 in Hebrew. The distinctiveness of the Tunisian Judeo-Arabic press is expressed not only in quantity but also in the unique journalistic language employed. This study analyzes the various ways of forming the plural in the JudeoArabic press of Tunis (1885–1940). The examination of masculine and feminine sound plural, broken plural, dual and pseudo-dual, as well as the existence of the combined plural expose the linguistic layers of the newspapers’ language. These layers include literary Arabic, Tunisian Jewry’s spoken dialect; the layer of the spoken Judeo-Arabic of Tunis, and the layer of the Muslim Arabic dialect of Tunis. One of the main questions raised in this article is the reason why Tunis Maskilim use the combined plural in their writings. This rare method of plural formation indicates the creativity and diversity of the language in the Tunis Judeo-Arabic press. Conversely, it might indicate the writers’ lack of proficiency in literary Arabic. Writers aspired to use high-register language, and combined it with linguistic forms from the spoken language. The existence of the combined plural can often be seen as a particular stage in a process of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
