[Avodah] Parlez Vous Old French?

[Akiva Miller via Avodah]

I have a question about an Old French word that appears in a Rashi. I hope
that someone on the list is fairly fluent in French, or has access to such
a person. But first, an introduction...

It is not unusual for an English-speaker to refer to Rosh Hashana as the
"New Year", or to Yom Kippur as the "Day of Atonement". These are
legitimate translations, and it is clear to me that they are used in
certain circles. In contrast, the name of Chanuka is generally not
translated; it is transliterated or adapted into English as Chanukkah or
Hanuka or something similar, but translations like "Festival of Dedication"
(and "Festival of Lights", which isn't really a translation at all) are
much rarer.

But this post is not about those holidays; it is about the one we just
completed. I have long thought that the English language was unique, in
that we have a translation for the name Pesach, namely "Passover". I
concede that although we might perceive of "Passover" as a basic word of
simple English, it was actually coined by William Tyndale in the early
1500s, for the specific purpose of translating the root "pesach" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Legacy). Be that as it may, it
*IS* an easily-understood term for any English-speaker, most especially in
the contexts of Shmos 12:11-13: "They will eat the Passover offering... and
I will pass over them..." and Shmos 12:27: “It is the Passover offering, to
G-d Who passed over the homes of the Israelites in Egypt..."

I had long thought that English-speakers are uniquely fortunate to have
grown up with this concept as a part of our language. According to my
research, Pesach is called "Pascua" in Spanish, "Pâque" in French, and
"Passah" in German. To my ear, all of these seem to be transliterations and
adaptations, much more like Hanuka than Passover. In my imagination, I
always saw a seder in Paris, and when they got to Rabban Gamliel's Three
Things, the leader had to go on an etymological sidetrack, while his
brother in London kept the focus on the experiential story.

But last week I saw Rashi at the very end of Shemos 12:11. After explaining
the verb p-s-ch to mean skipping and jumping, he writes (as translated and
explained by Rabbi Yisrael Isser Tzvi Herczeg, in ArtScroll's Rashi on
Shemos): "And also [the Old French term for Passover,] *Pasche*, is an
expression of stepping."

A footnote in that edition tells us that this "appears to have been
inserted into the text of Rashi by someone other than Rashi himself", but
that is utterly irrelevant, because no rabbinic authority is needed for the
question I am asking. I could ask my question to any ordinary Jacques: How
do the French refer to Pesach in their language, now and/or 900 years ago?
And is that word more of a translation, or more of a transliteration?

Akiva Miller
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