In the Biblical
commentaries, concerned, as a rule, not so much with the
explanation of the meaning of a word as with its grammatical
form, the laazim reproduce the person, tense, or gender of the
Hebrew word; in the Talmudic commentaries, where the difficulty
resides in the very sense of the word, the laazim give a
translation without regard to grammatical form.
At the present time these laazim are of interest to us, not only
as the expression of Rashi's ideas, but also as vehicles of
information concerning the old French. As early an investigator
as Zunz remarked that if one could restore them to their original
form, they would serve as a lexicon of the French language at the
time of the Crusades. But even Zunz did not realize the full
value to be extracted from them. The rare specimens that we
possess of the
langue d'oil[55] of the eleventh century
belong to the Norman dialect and to the language of poetry.
Written, as they were, in Champagne, the laazim of Rashi
represent almost the pure French (the language spoken in
Champagne lay between the dialect of the Ile-de-France and that
of Lorraine [56]), and, what is more, they were words in common
use among the people, for they generally designated objects of
daily use. These laazim, then, constitute a document of the
highest importance for the reconstruction of old French, as much
from a phonetic and morphologic point of view, as from the point
of view of lexicography; for the Hebrew transcription fixes to a
nicety the pronunciation of the word because of the richness of
the Hebrew in vowels and because of the strict observance of the
rules of transcription.
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