Zarfatian language

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cautious

Spoken in

Northern France ,
Flanders ,
Rhineland
speaker extinct ( 14th century )
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

roa (other Romance languages)

ISO 639-3

zrp

Zarfati or Judeo-French , Jewish French ( Zarfati : Tsarfatit ) is an extinct Romance language used by the Jews of northern France (i.e. in the area of ​​the Langues d'oïl ), in Flanders and the Jewish communities of the Rhineland ( Mainz , Frankfurt am Main, etc.) was spoken. The status of Zarfatian as an independent language in contrast to Old French is controversial among linguists .

Etymology and history

The name Zarfati goes back to the Hebrew name for France, Tzarfat (צרפת). This in turn is derived from the biblical name of the Phoenician city Sarepta .

After the Jews were expelled from France in several waves from the 11th century , first in 1182, again in 1306 and finally in 1394 , and some of them fled eastwards to the Holy Roman Empire , a new language, Yiddish , developed through the extensive adoption of Middle High German . With the final expropriation and expulsion from France in 1306 under Philip IV and in 1394 under Charles VI. the ground for celibacy was withdrawn and the language died out in the 14th century .

Written language

The language was written in a variant of the Hebrew alphabet and is first documented in a gloss of texts from the Bible and the Talmud of the rabbis Moshe ha-Darzhan and Rashi from the 11th century . A peculiarity of the Zarfatian language was the fact that it made extensive use of the Tiberian system of "puncturing" (Hebrew Nikkud ) in order to better represent the vowels of Old French . Compared to other Judaeo-Romance languages ​​and Yiddish, the Zarfatian also had fewer loanwords from Hebrew.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marc Kiwitt: Judeo-French. Jewish Language Research website, accessed November 22, 2013 .