Using Text-to-Speech AI to Read Sefardí (Sephardic Vienna)

Sefardí (also known as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish) is a Romance language—closely related to Spanish—spoken by the Sephardic Jews on the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco. Following the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon in 1492, Sephardic communities kept on speaking Sefardí in the diaspora:
For most of the refugees in the 15th and 16th century, the Ottoman Empire was the main destination and Salonika (Thessaloníki) became the largest Sephardic community until almost the entire population was murdered in the Shoah¹.

Due to the similarities between the two languages, Spanish speakers are able to understand texts in Sefardí—or rather, they would if they learn to read. Like Yiddish, Sefardí is written in a variety of the Hebrew alphabet (with some phonetic differences to the modern Hebrew alphabet). While there is no shortcut to learn the alphabet, text-to-speech ai tools can be useful as a kind of learning aid, I would argue.

Let’s take this title page as example:

https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/674956 (PDM 1.0)

This is from the bilingual history of the Sephardic community in Vienna, self-published in 1888 and written both in German and Sefardí (the latter text was authored by chief rabbi Michael Papo). The Viennese Sephardic community dates back to the 1730s when Jewish merchants from the Ottoman Empire started a commercial settlement in Vienna. By the late 19th century, they entertained a synagogue², a school, charities, and even a newspaper (Stechauner 2021). The book recounts this history from a Sephardic perspective.

In order to “read” the title page with the help of text-to-speech ai, copy the following lines and paste them into an online text-to-speech tool like https://micmonster.com/text-to-speech/hebrew-israel/ and listen to the generated audio.

איסטודייא די לה קומונידאד ישראלית איטפאנייולה אין ו'יינה. דיל טיימפו די סו פ'ונדאסייון אסטה אויי סיגון דאטוס איסטוריקוס אין איספאנייול פור מיכאל מוחס פאפו פונסייונארייו די לה וינ'ה קומונידאד. 

Admittedly this method is far from perfect, mostly due to the phonetic differences between Sefardí and modern Hebrew (e.g., the tool renders פור as “phor” whereas this would be read in Sefardí as the very common “por”). Again, the AI support is by no means a substitute for genuine reading skills – but may be helpful as propaedeutic or “motivational” tool for beginners with (some) knowledge of Spanish.

Finally, a brief comparison of the Sefardí and modern Spanish (and for the German version of the title page, see https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/674922 ):

References

• Zemlinszky, Adolf von / Papo, Michael (1888): Geschichte der türkisch-israelitischen Gemeinde zu Wien von ihrer Gründung bis heute: nach historischen Daten. Verf. von Adolf v. Zemlinszky. Uebers. in’s Jüdisch-Span. von Michael Papo. Wien/Viena. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/titleinfo/674919

• Curso de Cultura Hispanojudía y Sefardí de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (1992-2008, Toledo) https://dialnet.unirioja.es/congreso/704
• Hecht, Louise / Hecht Dieter Mayerhofer, Kerstin / Siluk, Avraham (eds.) (2014): Quellen zur jüdischen Geschichte im Heiligen Römischen Reich und seinen Nachfolgestaaten. Böhlau Verlag: Wien, Göttingen. https://doi.org/10.7767/boehlau.9783205793410
• Stechauner, Martin (2021): El Koreo de Viena: A Sephardic Newspaper on the Western Fringes of Southeastern Europe. In: Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate / Terpitz, Olaf (eds.): Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Böhlau Verlag: Wien, pp. 63-82. https://doi.org/10.7767/9783205212904.63