Zarphatic language

Infobox Language
name=Zarphatic
nativename=צרפתית "Tzarfatit"
states=France
region=Europe
extinct=14th century
familycolor=Indo-European
fam2=Italic
fam3=Romance
fam4=Italo-Western
fam5=Western
fam6=Gallo-Iberian
fam7=Gallo-Romance
fam8=Gallo-Rhaetian
fam9=Oïl
fam10=French
iso2=roa|iso3=zrp

Zarphatic or Judæo-French (Zarphatic: "Tsarfatit") is an extinct Jewish language, formerly spoken among the Jewish communities of northern France and in parts of what is now west-central Germany, in such cities as Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, and Aachen.

Etymology

The word "Zarphatic" comes from the Hebrew name for France, "Tzarfat" (צרפת), the Biblical name for the Phoenician city of Sarepta. Some have conjectured that Zarphatic was the original language of the Jews who eventually adopted Old High German, which led to the development of Yiddish.

Zarphatic was written using a variant of the Hebrew alphabet, and first appeared in the 11^th century, in glosses to texts of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud written by the great rabbis Rashi and Rabbi Moshe HaDarshan. Constant expulsions and persecutions, resulting in great waves of Jewish migration, brought about the extinction of this short-lived, but important, language by the end of the 14^th century.

Distinct features

One feature of Zarphatic spelling, that sets it apart from most other Indo-European Jewish languages, is that to represent vowel sounds, rather than using Hebrew letters with no matching phonemes in the language, it instead made extensive use of the Tiberian system of niqqudot to indicate the full range of Old French vowels.

Another interesting feature of Zarphatic is that it displays relatively few Hebrew loanwords. This sets it apart from the vast majority of other Jewish languages, and may indicate that it is not actually a distinct language, rather a dialect of Old French, or simply Old French, written using a different orthography. (Old French did not have a written standard.)

See also

*Judæo-Romance languages

References

*Information for this article draws heavily on the information presented on the [http://www.jewish-languages.org/judeo-french.html Jewish Languages project Judæo-French page]
*Information on the classification of Zarphatic was taken from [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=zrp the Ethnologue.com "Zarphatic" page]