[Avodah] Old French

[Jay F. Shachter via Avodah]

> 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, "P?que" 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."

The French word for "step" is "pas". In Rashi's time the 's' was
pronounced. That gives you the first two consonants of the p-s-x root.
The third consonant is an aspirate which, although it never drops out in
inflected forms like the h does, might still be considered dispensible
by an aspirational (sorry, I couldn't resist) etymologist willing to
cut corners. It is a bogus albeit tempting etymology, like the ones
you see in Hirsch.

> 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?

I can't tell you how the French of Rashi's time referred to Pesax.
There are no French translations of the Hebrew Scriptures dating to then.
The French Jews probably said "Pesach". That's what Yiddish speakers
say today and I have no reason to think that their ancestors did any
differently. French Jews nowadays -- who speak, by and large, French,
although there are some who speak Arabic among themselves -- also say
"Pesach", usually. Sometimes they say "Paque" (circumflex accent on the
'a' deliberately omitted because the Avodah digest software chokes on it,
which is unfortunate, because the circumflex, which always indicates a
missing 's', would be highly informative if you could see it), which is
the correct French word, but it is rare for them to do so. I don't like
saying "Paque" because it is also the French word for "Easter" and thus
evokes a disagreeable sense of linguistic imperialism, even though the
imperialism is almost certainly operating in the other direction here, I
would think -- taking a Hirschian risk here, but there are worse people to
emulate -- that the French word for "Easter" obviously comes from p-s-x.

                        Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
                                jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"