Hebrew language Gemara, generally comments on the Mishnah and Baraitot in two forms of Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the text of the Gemara. Because as early as the Torah's transcription the Scribe has been the highest position in Judaism, Hebrew was always regarded as the language of Israel's religion, history and national pride, and after it faded as a spoken language, it continued to be used as a "lingua franca" among scholars and Jews traveling in foreign countries. After the 2nd century CE when the
Zarphatic language led to the development of Yiddish. It was written by a modified Hebrew script and first appeared in the 11th century, in 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 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 system of