Do you REALLY know what the word "Ghetto" means?

[solleticosoffro]

I doubt, so watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTER_9nhIvg

A professor of the Hebrew Museum of Venezia teach you some curiosities about why "Ghettos" are called "Ghettos" all around the World, and what the term really means, and who decided that Hebrew places to live should have called like that. It will takes only 1.41 minutes, it's very interessing.

 

[Nedstacey2]

Molte grazie for sharing that. It's interesting how the use of the term has evolved in American English also. I wonder if most younger people today would catch on to a denotation like in the title of the Elvis standard "In the Ghetto" since the sociocultural reference and unfortunate pejorative racial connotations of the noun ghetto have been pretty much taken over by inner city. But the usage of the derived adjective is widespread and productive, as attested by consultation of a resource like Urban Dictionary (yes, I grasp the irony), e.g., ghetto talk and That's so ghetto.

 

[solleticosoffro]

Prego!

I am happy to see that at least one of this forum's memeber liked that. I found it very interesting.

I know that you in America uses this term in a different meaning; I thought, anyway, that all of you knew perfectly that this term indicated Hebraic quarters in medieval Europe.

 

[Nedstacey2]

Actually, I'd bet that even fewer Americans associate the term with the historical Jewish enclaves of Europe, let alone know of its origin there or particularly with this one in Venice as the professor explains in the video. Some of us in the English-speaking world who are interested in World War II or Holocaust history are familiar with ghettos being the name for the cordoned-off areas in cities or towns that the Nazis herded Jews into in occupied lands, especially in Poland, prior to eventually razing many of these sections and transporting their inhabitants to extermination camps. I'm not even sure what these were called in German, though the video does suggest that German-speaking Jews in the Venice ghetto were responsible for the prevailing initial /g/, which in Italian I know you write as gh before front vowels like e, nor what the term was in Polish or Yiddish for that matter.