G'day,

A local (east coast of Australia) singer, Helen Rivero, specialises in Sephardic songs ... many of them in Ladino. I love her renditions and her sense of the theatre of language.

Reading some of the lyrics (written in Roman characters) the language seems to be strongly reminiscent of Provençal ... or a generalised Mediterranean 'Romance' language. I suspect that, before modern boundaties became poltically defined, there would have been gradations of common language right along the northern coast of the Mediterranean.

Regards,

Bob Bolton