Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries along the North Sea coast, roughly between the mouths of the Rhine and Weser rivers. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland (today's Northern Friesland) also spoke Old Frisian, but there are no known medieval texts from this area. The language of the earlier inhabitants of the region between the Zuiderzee and Ems River (the Frisians mentioned by Tacitus) is attested in only a few personal names and place-names. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian, spoken from the 16th to the 19th century.
In the early Middle Ages, Frisia stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the Weser River in northern Germany[citation needed]. At the time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. This region is referred to as Greater Frisia or Magna Frisia, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage. However, by 1300, their territory had been pushed back to the Zuiderzee (now the IJsselmeer), and the Frisian language survives along the coast only as a substrate.
A close relationship exists between Old Frisian and Old English; this is due to a shared history, language and culture of the people from Northern Germany and Denmark who came to settle in England from around 400 A.D. onwards.
The Codex Roorda is a medieval document with Latin and Old Frisian law texts.
Consonants
Generally, Old Frisian phonologically resembles Old English. In particular, it shares the palatalisation of velar consonants also found in Old English. For example, whereas the closely related Old Saxon and Old Dutch retain the velar in dag, Old Frisian has dei and Old English has dæġ[dæj]. When initial and followed by front vowels the Germanic /k/, changed to the sounds /ts/ and /j/. Proto-Germanic /ɣ/ became /j/ after /e/, and word-initially before front vowels. Proto-Germanic /g/, where it existed, became /dz/. The Old Frisian for church was tzirke or tzerke, in Old English it was ċiriċe[ˈtʃiritʃe], while Old Saxon and Old Dutch have the unpalatalised kirika. Palatalization postdated fronting, and predated monophthongization and i-umlaut.[1]
Between vowels, h generally disappears (sian from *sehwaną), as in Old English and Old Dutch. Word-initial h- on the other hand is retained.[2] Old Frisian retains th in all positions for longer than Old Dutch and Old Saxon do, showing the gradual spread of the shift from th to d from south to north, beginning in southern Germany in the 9th century, but not reaching Frisian until the 13th or 14th century.[2]
Vowels
Another feature shared between Old Frisian and Old English is the Anglo-Frisian brightening, which fronted a to æ except in certain conditions:[3]
Before /xx/, /xs/, /xt/, short /e/, /i/ became /iu/ in a process known as "breaking".[5] An unrelated sound change where /i/ became /iu/ if /u/ or /w/ followed in the next syllable occurred later, after I-mutation.[6]
Vowels were fronted or raised in before /i/, /j/ a process called I-mutation:[7]
/a(ː)/ > /æ(ː)/
/æ/ > /e/
/u(ː)/ > /y(ː)/
/o(ː)/ > /æ(ː)/
The old Germanic diphthongs *ai and *au become ē/ā and ā, respectively, in Old Frisian, as in ēn/ān ("one") from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, and brād from *braudą ("bread"). In comparison, these diphthongs become ā and ēa (ān and brēad) in Old English, and ē and ō (ēn and brōd) in Old Saxon. The diphthong *eu generally becomes ia, and Germanic *iu is retained. These diphthongs initially began with a syllabic (stressed) i, but the stress later shifts to the second component, giving to iā and iū. For example, thiād ("people") and liūde from Proto-Germanic *þeudō and *liudīz.[8]
Old Frisian (c.1150– c.1550) retained grammatical cases. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the 12th or 13th century, but most are from the 14th and 15th centuries. Generally, all these texts are restricted to legal writings. Although the earliest written examples of Frisian—stray words in a Latin context—are from approximately the 9th century, there are a few examples of runic inscriptions from the region which are older and in a very early form of the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually consist of no more than inscriptions of a single or few words.
Old Frisian had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases (Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, although traces of an instrumental and locative case exist)[11]
Dual forms are unattested in Old Frisian but their presence is confirmed by their continued existence in later Frisian dialects until the mid-20th century.[13]
Nouns
A significant portion of Old Frisian nouns fall into the a-stem declension pattern. Most a-stem nouns are masculine or neuter.
Certain words like dei "day" have "g" in the plural endings.[15]
All nouns in the ō-stem declension were feminine. The nominative Singular -e comes from the accusative case.[16]
Text sample
The Creation of Adam
English
Old Frisian
God created the first man, that was Adam, from eight things:
God scop thene eresta meneska - thet was Adam - fon achta wendem:
the bones from the rock,
thet benete fon tha stene,
the flesh from the earth,
thet flask fon tha erthe,
the blood from the water,
thet blod fon tha wetere,
the heart from the wind,
tha herta fon tha winde,
the thoughts from the clouds,
thene thogta fon tha wolkem,
the sweat from the dew,
thet swet fon tha dawe,
the (hair)locks from the grass,
tha lokkar fon tha gerse,
the eyes from the sun,
tha agene fon there sunna,
and then He breathed holy breath on it.
and tha ble'r'em on thene helga om.
And then He created Eve from his rib, Adam's beloved.
And tha scop'er Eva fon sine ribbe, Adames liava.
Corpus
There are some early Frisian names preserved in Latin texts, and some runic (Futhorc) inscriptions, but the oldest surviving texts in Old Frisian date from the 13th century, in particular official and legal documents. They show a considerable degree of linguistic uniformity.
The Frisian languages are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, owing to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia and Germany.
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: Ingvaeonic, which includes English and the Frisian languages; Istvaeonic, which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Irminonic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or c. 1550, there was no overarching standard language, but all dialects were mutually intelligible. During that period, a rich Medieval Dutch literature developed, which had not yet existed during Old Dutch. The various literary works of the time are often very readable for speakers of Modern Dutch since Dutch is a rather conservative language.
Middle Low German is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented in writing since about 1225/34 (Sachsenspiegel). During the Hanseatic period, Middle Low German was the leading written language in the north of Central Europe and served as a lingua franca in the northern half of Europe. It was used parallel to medieval Latin also for purposes of diplomacy and for deeds.
Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German. It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons, a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony. It partially shares Anglo-Frisian's Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch, Luxembourgish and German.
Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic in the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE. It evolved into the dialects of Old Norse at the beginning of the Viking Age around 800 CE, which later themselves evolved into the modern North Germanic languages.
A-mutation is a metaphonic process supposed to have taken place in late Proto-Germanic.
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
West Germanic gemination was a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages around the 3rd or 4th century AD. It affected consonants directly followed by, which were generally lengthened or geminated in that position. Because of Sievers' law, only consonants immediately after a short vowel were affected by the process.
The Anglo-Frisian languages are the Anglic and Frisian varieties of the West Germanic languages.
Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
Dutch phonology is similar to that of other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans and West Frisian.
In linguistics, Old Dutch or Old Low Franconian is the set of dialects that evolved from Frankish spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th or 9th to the 12th century. Old Dutch is mostly recorded on fragmentary relics, and words have been reconstructed from Middle Dutch and Old Dutch loanwords in French.
Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance l, languages.
In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic languages. This includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon, and to a lesser degree Old Dutch.
The phonology of Old Saxon mirrors that of the other ancient Germanic languages, and also, to a lesser extent, that of modern West Germanic languages such as English, Dutch, Frisian, German, and Low German.
The phonological system of the Old English language underwent many changes during the period of its existence. These included a number of vowel shifts, and the palatalisation of velar consonants in many positions.
References
Bremmer, Rolf H. (2009). An Introduction to Old Frisian. History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN978-90-272-3255-7.
Hartmann, Frederik, Old Frisian breaking and labial mutation revisited. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
