Talk:Zarphatic language

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Was there an ethnic name for Zarphatic-speaking Jews?

As far as I'm aware, there was no ethnonym for this community other than simply "Jewish". There were Jews in the community who were expatriates from Spain, but in those days, Sfaradim and Ashkenazim were names that had far more to do with where a person came from, than to do with distinctions between communities. Remember, Tzarfatit died out as a spoken and written language, as a result of persecutions and population movements, a century before the expulsion from Spain. Northern France was a crossroads of northern Europe, and for the Jewish communities, at that time, it consisted far more of roads than of towns. Specific ethnonyms are the kind of thing that take community cohesion to develop. :-/ Tomer ^TALK 00:56, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)

I've off and on been attempting to do some research on French- I don't think I'll be able to contribute much to an article on Zarphatic without having some knowledge of French- and the research seems to get more and more complicated as time goes by.

A big problem is, it often seems difficult to distinguish what's a language and what's a dialect.

In retrospect, I wish I'd taken french back in college. I will if I ever go back to college.

Gringo300 16:28, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a "citation needed" in the etymology section of this article after the claim that Zarphatic was the original language spoken by the Jews who eventually adopted Old High German. Where is this theory found? I've wondered about the many French words in Yiddish myself but I've never heard this theory.

Aupiff (talk) 01:53, 11 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to change this to Zarphatic may have *influenced* Yiddish - the origins of Western Yiddish among Jews who migrated from Italy over the Alps and down the Rhine are uncontroversial and the (minority) claim that Eastern Yiddish has Knaanic substrate has nothing to do with Zarphatic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.124.141.112 (talk) 16:18, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]