Not quite Multilingual Monday but ...
Friday night I attended a shabbat service at Or Chadash in Chicago, as my friend Reuven was leading services that evening (and I promised that I'd show up more than once a year!). The service ended with a Ladino version of אין כאלהינו, Ein Keloheinu, "There is none like our God", and as I looked at the romanized lyrics, I thought to myself:
"This is just Spanish!"
Granted, there were some sound changes here and there (the one I remember is modern Spanish nuestro being Ladino muestro), but everything as a Spanish speaker to me was understandable except loaremos, which is a word I'd never heard. Sure enough, looking up the verb loar gave "to praise", though it doesn't seem to be terribly common in modern Spanish. Still, for me it was completely understandable, and was much closer to modern Spanish than, say, Yiddish is to modern German.
"This is just Spanish!"
Granted, there were some sound changes here and there (the one I remember is modern Spanish nuestro being Ladino muestro), but everything as a Spanish speaker to me was understandable except loaremos, which is a word I'd never heard. Sure enough, looking up the verb loar gave "to praise", though it doesn't seem to be terribly common in modern Spanish. Still, for me it was completely understandable, and was much closer to modern Spanish than, say, Yiddish is to modern German.