Etymology
The term ''Zarphatic'', coined by Solomon Birnbaum,S. A. Birnbaum, ''Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar'', Second Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 33. comes from the Hebrew name for France, ''Tzarfat'' (), which was originally used in the Hebrew Bible as a name for the city of Sarepta, in Phoenicia. Some have conjectured that the language influenced the development of Yiddish language, Yiddish.Writing
It was written by a modified Hebrew script and first appeared in the 11th century, in gloss (annotation), glosses to texts of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud written by the great rabbis Rashi and Moshe HaDarshan. Constant expulsions and persecutions, resulting in great waves of Jewish migration, brought about the extinction of Zarphatic by the end of the 14th century. One feature, unlike most other Indo-European languages, Indo-European Jewish languages, was that to represent vowel sounds, instead of using Hebrew letters with no matching phonemes in the language, it made extensive use of the Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian system of niqqud, vocalisation to indicate the full range of Old French vowels.See also
*Judeo-Romance languagesReferences
*Information for this article draws heavily on the information presented on thExternal links
* Menahem Banitt and Cyril Aslanov (1972, 2006)