The spelling has remained more or less traditional, and though it becomes finally phonetic, it seems to ascribe to the vowels the values nearest to those of the mother-language and current in certain varieties of the Lithuanian group. From this it may be assumed that the Polish and southern Russian varieties have developed from the Lithuanian, which probably bears some relation to the historical migrations into those parts of the quondam Polish kingdom, and this is made the more plausible from the fact that the vowel changes are frequently in exact correspondence with the changes in the White Russian, Polish, and Little Russian. Such a phenomenon of parallelism is found also in other languages, and in our case may be explained by the unconscious changes of the Germanic vowels simultaneously with those in the Slavic words which, having been naturalized in Judeo-German, were heard and used differently in the new surroundings. However it may be, the language of the Judeo-German books in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is subject to but slight variations. It is true, the Blitz Bible printed in Amsterdam in 1676 seems to deviate greatly from other similar works, and the uncouth compound which is found there does, indeed, have all appearances of a Jargon. It owes its origin to the Polish Jews who but a few years before had been exiled from more than two hundred and fifty towns[16] and who, having settled in Holland, began to modify their Judeo-German by introducing Dutch into it. Although the Bible was intended for Polish Jews, as is evident by the letters-patent granted by John the Third of Poland, yet it has never exerted any influence on the dialects in Russia and Poland, for not one word of Dutch origin can be found in them. This older stage of the language is even now familiar to the Russian Jewish women through the 'Zeena Ureena,' the prayer book, and the special prayers which they recite in Judeo-German, and Jewish writers have recourse to it whenever they wish to express a prayer, as, for example, in Abramowitsch's 'Hymns' and 'Saturday Prayers.' This older stage is known under the name of _Iwre-teutsch_, _Korben-ssider-teutsch_, _Tchines-teutsch_, thus indicating its proper sphere in lithurgical works. This form of the language is comparatively free from Hebrew words.[17] On the other hand, Cabbalistic works become almost unreadable on account of the prevalence of Semitic over German words.[18]