Judeo-Spanish Language Evolution in the 16th Century through Chronicles of the Ottoman Kings

This paper will focus on the state of the Judeo-Spanish language in the 16th century as it is reflected in the work Crónicas de los reyes otomanos (Chronicles of the Ottoman Kings), by the Sephardic author Moises Almosnino. According to the author and, as it is pointed out on the very pages of the book, he was one of the few members of the Sephardic community in Salonika who was fluent in Trukish ar the time. This was a key factor in his appointment as a representative of the Jews of the city in the delegation sent to the Ottoman court to negotiate the taxted that applied to the community.

The analysis of the recurrence of lexicographic and morphosyntactic loans -mostly borrowings from Turkish- or the thematic field where they can be found, will help us to determine the degree of evolution of Judeo-Spanish in this early times. Afterwards, the finding will be compared with those of the subsequent corpora, trying to provide evidence of the changes that the Sephardic language went through.