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Judeo-Italian, Primo Levi's grandmother tongue.

Article Excerpt
A century or so ago, Jews in Italy were typically bidialectal or even tridialectal. They could speak standard Italian or the local dialect or both, and they could also speak their own Jewish dialect of Italian. Judeo-Italian dialects at one time were written in the Hebrew alphabet. In many ways, Judeo-Italian is analogous to Yiddish and Ladino.

Primo Levi came from Turin, in the Italian province of Piedmont. His mother tongue was Italian, but the mother tongue of his ancestors was Judeo-Italian, making Judeo-Italian his grandmother tongue. He wrote in Italian, but he wrote about any number of subjects, among them Judeo-Italian.

We all know Primo Levi was a chemist and a writer. Few people ever think of him as a linguist. But he wrote an important linguistic work, "Argon," the first chapter of The Periodic Table. Furthermore, he wrote a fantasy, "Lead," also in The Periodic Table, that shows a remarkable knowledge of historical linguistics and is an incentive to further study.

Primo Levi found the world very interesting. He succeeded in describing the horrors of his Auschwitz experiences so very well because he found even horror interesting. Needless to say, he found language and languages interesting, not only because of their own fascinating structures and history, but because language is the way we pursue our insights and communicate our experiences.

The word "linguist" has at least two meanings. A linguist may be a person who speaks several languages. A linguist is also a person who studies linguistics. Primo Levi was both. He was not a student of linguistics per se, but he wrote about the etymologies of the names of the chemicals he studied. More notably, he wrote about the fascinating dialect of the Jews of Turin and of Piedmont in general. Although The Periodic Table is a memoir, to a large extent, the information in "Argon" is important enough to have been cited by professional linguists. (1)

Judeo-Italian dialects, like dialects everywhere in the world, varied from city to city and region to region. Nevertheless, they are more similar to each...