According to the linguist B. Pottier, when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they took with them the varieties of Spanish - Leonese, Aragonese and especially Castilian (the language of the Court) - that were common to those who practised the country's three religions. These form the substratum of that which, around 1620, would become the Judeo-Spanish vernacular, known as Spaniol, Judezmo, Judy¢, Jidy¢ (according to Edgard Morin), Spaniolith (Spaniolish for the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti) or Espanioliko in the Middle East, Haketiya in northern Morocco or Tetuani in the region around Oran in Algeria. All of these terms designate the Judeo-Spanish vernacular, which would in turn also evolve. We say around 1620, because the process by which travellers from Spain stopped being able to understand the ancestor of their language in the Spanish spoken by the descendants of those they had expelled was a gradual one and attributed Jewishness to these people. Similarly, the Muslim Turks who knew Spanish only via the Jewish minority called the language Yahudije (Yahudice means "Jewish" in Turkish). Thus, by means of a historical mistranslation, the Spanish Jews' language became their identifier. Judy¢ (Jew) designates both the language (the Judeo-Spanish vernacular) and the speaker of Judeo-Spanish (the Sepharad), as is the case with Yiddish (Ger., Jüdisch meaning Jew) for the Ashkenazim. By means of a similar mistranslation, we would have probably attributed a Judeo-French language to the French Canadians if they had been Jews! This is absurd, and yet the name Judeo-Spanish has stuck.

Judeo-Spanish, a language of fusion, is essentially 15th century Castilian, coloured initially by regionalisms and hispanic Arabicisms, and after 1492 by Moroccan Arabicisms, Turkisms, Italianisms, Hellenisms, Slavisms, etc. taken on in the various host countries. Later, with the creation of the schools of the Alliance Isra,lite Universelle in 1860, the language was affected by a mania for gallicization, to the point that a new dialect called judeo-fragnol (Judeo-Franco-Spanish) emerged.

We said in our subtitle that Judeo-Spanish is a living museum for 15th century Spanish. Indeed, in 1492 - the date of the Jews' expulsion from Spain - Castilian had not yet undergone the silencing of voiced sibilants or the birth of the jota. Thus, the intervocalic [z] of that time remains, and one continued to say [meza] for mesa, (with [s], "table"). Similarly, one continued to say [ka's'a] for caja, "box" or "crate," or [pa'z'a] for paja, or "straw." It is precisely for this reason that Don Quixote [Don Ki's'o-te], which is now written Don Quijote - with jota - arrived in France as Don Quichotte, with [ch], reflecting the pronunciation of that time.

Ladino is not spoken, rather, it is the product of a word-for- word translation of Hebrew or Aramaic biblical or liturgical texts made by rabbis in the Jewish schools of Spain. In these, translations, a specific Hebrew or Aramaic word always corresponded to the same Spanish word, as long as no exegetical considerations prevented this. In short, Ladino is only Hebrew clothed in Spanish, or Spanish with Hebrew syntax. The famous Ladino translation of the Bible, the Biblia de Ferrara (1553), provided inspiration for the translation of numerous Spanish Christian Bibles. Apart from the phonetic, morphological and syntactic differences mentioned above (which are very rare, especially in the romances and proverbs), the spoken language, Judezmo (the Judeo-Spanish vernacular) does not differ much from peninsular Spanish. However, as mentioned above, Ladino faithfully reflects the sacred languages (Hebrew and Aramaic), making it semi-sacred.