The term Zarphatic, coined by Solomon Birnbaum,[7] comes from the Hebrew name for France, Tzarfat (צרפת), which was originally used in the Hebrew Bible as a name for the city of Sarepta, in Phoenicia.
Unlike most other Jewish languages which had a lot of loan words from Hebrew, it had relatively few. This has led to the conclusion that it may not have been a far-distant language but, instead, a dialect of Old French.[8]
History and use
Zarphatic was written using a variation of the Hebrew alphabet. It first appeared in this form in the 11th century in glosses of the Torah and Talmud written by the rabbis Moshe HaDarshan and Rashi.[3] The language became secularised during the 13th century, becoming used in varied domains such as poetry, medicine, astronomy, and commerce.[3]
Most linguists agree that Zarphatic was not fundamentally different from Old French, and that it was more of a writing system and literary tradition that reflected the Jewish culture of the day. According to some researchers,[9] it was different from the Christian majority dialect, and thus a specific Judeo-Romance language. However, other linguists contend that it was essentially the same as Christian dialects of the same regions, with only some Hebrew influences.[10]
It seems that Zarphatic was probably never a vernacular language, and that the Jews of the area did not speak a differing language or dialect, at least not one distinguished by phonology or lexicon beyond that specific to a community.[11] Rather, it acted more as a liturgical language, for exegesis and literature. Its primary use was for explanation and vulgarisation of biblical and rabbinical literature. Most of the elements from the Hebrew language are found in the function words (articles, prepositions, etc.), though there are some changed to verbs and vocabulary.[12]
Extinction
Due to the constant persecution, killing and expulsion of Jews from France[13] and other European nations, the Zarphatic language likely went extinct in the 14th century; documentation of the language slows in the mid-14th century.[3] The last known example of Zarphatic is a recipe for charoset written in 1470.[10]
Writing system
Zarphatic was written using the Hebrew writing system and the Tiberian system for diacritical markers and reflected some Latin writing traditions that help to distinguish it from a solely phonetic reproduction of spoken language.[3][10]
Not all Hebrew graphemes are used in Zarphatic: the graphemes kaph (כ), samekh (ס), and tav (ת), are rare, and ḥet (ח) and ʕayin (ע) are omitted entirely.[3]
^Weinreich, M. (1959). History of the Yiddish Language: The Problems and Their Implications. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 103(4), 563–570. http://www.jstor.org/stable/985559
^S. A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, Second Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 33.
