Revival of the Hebrew language many Jews spoke a related Semitic language, Aramaic.) From the 2nd century CE until the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language "circa" 1880, Hebrew served as a literary and official language and as the Judaic language of prayer. After the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the 2nd century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue. Even so, during the Middle Ages, Jews used the language in a wide variety of disciplines. This usage kept alive a substantial portion of the traits characteristic of Hebrew. First and foremost, Classical Hebrew was preserved in full through
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