Old Frisian
| Old Frisian | |
|---|---|
| Frisesk | |
 A page of the Brokmerbrief (1345) | |
| Region | Frisia (modern-day Netherlands, Germany, and Southern Denmark) |
| Ethnicity | Frisians |
| Era | 8th to 16th centuries |
Early forms | |
| Anglo–Frisian runes Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ofs |
ofs | |
| Glottolog | oldf1241 |
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 Frisii 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.[1] 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.
Classification
[edit]Old Frisian is a West Germanic language, which is a part of the larger Germanic language family.[2]
Nomenclature
[edit]Despite its name, Old Frisian was contemporary with Middle Dutch, Middle English, and both Middle High and Middle Low German.[3] The periods of the Frisian languages are traditionally divided into Pre–Old Frisian (before 1275), Old Frisian (1275–1550), Middle Frisian (1550–1800), and modern Frisian (1800–present), though some scholars such as Germen de Haan have argued that there is no reason to demarcate them this way and that these periods are more in line with literary periods rather than linguistic change.[4] According to de Haan, what is referred to as "Old Frisian" should really be called "Middle Frisian" and what is called "Middle Frisian" should be referred to as "Early Modern Frisian".[5] De Haan argues that the current nomenclature is misleading and confusing because it "wrongly suggests" that Old Frisian is contemporary other "old" languages such as Old English and Old Saxon.[6] Alistair Campbell expressed similar views, arguing that the Frisian spoken between the 14th and 16th centuries are better described as "Middle Frisian".[5]
History
[edit]Speakers
[edit]The earliest references to the Frisians are found in the works of Roman and Greek authors like Tacitus, as in his Germania, and Ptolomy, described as living from north of the estuary of the Rhine to around the Ems river. Although they were not a part of the Roman Empire, the areas comprising Frisia were akin to a tributary state and some Frisians served as mercenaries in the Roman army.[7] It is uncertain whether the Frisians described by the Romans were Germanic-speaking peoples; onomastic data suggests they spoke an Indo-European language that was neither Germanic nor Celtic, though Old Frisian was a member of the Germanic language family.[7] Following the retreat of Romans from the Low Countries in the 5th century, the Frisians spread considerably over the following two hundred years, dominating the North Sea region; some contemporary non-Frisian documents even refer to the North Sea as the Frisian Sea (Latin: Mare Frisicum).[8] During the period, Christianity was introduced to the region by Willibrord and Frisia was subjugated by Charles Martel and then later dominated by Charlemagne.[8]
Corpus
[edit]There are fewer than twenty surviving Old Frisian runic inscriptions, all of which are dated to between the 6th and 9th centuries.[2][9] Although some individual words are captured in Latin texts, the earliest Frisian-language text to survive to the modern period is an interlinear gloss of a Latin psalter thought to be from Fivelgo in the modern-day Netherlands and dated to around 1200. The first full manuscripts the First Brokmer Codex, dated to sometime between 1276 and 1300, and the the First Rüstring Codex, dated to around 1300. These documents are known to be copies, but the originals are not known to have survived.[10]
Legal texts dominate the surviving corpus of Old Frisian documents; all but one of the Frisian-language documents east of the Lauwers are legal documents.[11] To the west, however, textual diversity is much wider. Western documents include over a thousand charters and administrative documents, though poetry and historiographies have survived alongside them as well as several religious works.[12] During Latin's descent as the chosen language of legal texts like charters, Frisian began a linguistic decline as Low German was either of higher prestige or was more widely understood. However, Old Frisian documents were stil widely translated into Low German from the late 15th century until the turn of the 17th century and modern Low German demonstrates traces of Old Frisian influence, including in placenames, personal names, vocabulary, and syntax.[13] Between the Lauwers and the Ems, no original Frisian texts occur in the record after around 1450 and the last known public document composed in Frisian dates to 1547 following the introduction of Dutch as the language of administration by the Duke of Saxony.[13]
Phonological development
[edit]
Consonants
[edit]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.[14]
Between vowels, h generally disappears (sian from *sehwaną), as in Old English and Old Dutch. Word-initial h- on the other hand is retained.[15] 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.[15]
Vowels
[edit]Another feature shared between Old Frisian and Old English is the Anglo-Frisian brightening, which fronted a to æ except in certain conditions:[16]
- stressed and before nasals
- in the sequence (-)warC.
- before h(C), lC.
Much later, after breaking, /æ/ became /e/.[17]
Before /xx/, /xs/, /xt/, short /e/, /i/ became /iu/ in a process known as "breaking".[18] An unrelated sound change where /i/ became /iu/ if /u/ or /w/ followed in the next syllable occurred later, after I-mutation.[19]
Vowels were fronted or raised in before /i/, /j/ a process called I-mutation:[20]
- /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.[21]
Phonology
[edit]| Type | Front | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | |
| Close | i | iː | u | uː |
| Mid | e | eː, ɛː | o | o:, ɔː |
| Open | ɑ | ɑː | ||
| Type | Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m(ː) | n(ː) | (ŋ) | |||||||
| Stop | p(ː) | b(ː) | t(ː) | d(ː) | k(ː) | ɡ(ː) | ||||
| Fricative | f(ː) | (v) | θ(ː) | (ð) | s(ː) | z | x(ː) | (ɣ) | ||
| Approximant | j | w | ||||||||
| Liquid | r(ː) | l(ː) | ||||||||
Grammar
[edit]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)[24]
Pronouns
[edit]| First person | Second person | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative | ik | wī | thū | jī, ī, gī |
| Accusative | mī | ūs | þī | iu, io |
| Genitive | mīn | ūser | þīn | iuwer |
| Dative/instrumental | mī | ūs | þī | iu, io |
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.[26]
Nouns
[edit]A significant portion of Old Frisian nouns fall into the a-stem declension pattern. Most a-stem nouns are masculine or neuter.
| Case | Masculine bām « beam» |
Neuter | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light skip « boat » |
Heavy word « word» | |||||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative−Accusative | bām | bāmar, -er, -an, -a | skip | skipu | word | word |
| Genitive | bāmes | bāma | skipes | skipa | wordes | worda |
| Dative | bāme | bāmum, -em, -im | skipe | skipum | worde | wordum |
Certain words like dei "day" have "g" in the plural endings.[28]
All nouns in the ō-stem declension were feminine. The nominative Singular -e comes from the accusative case.[29]
Text sample
[edit]| 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
[edit]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.
- Westeremden yew-stick (c. 750–900)
- Fon Alra Fresena Fridome (at TITUS: TITUS)
- Ten Commandements (TITUS)
- 17 petitiones (TITUS)
- Londriucht (TITUS)
- Thet Freske Riim (TITUS, ed. E. Epkema, Google Books)
- Skeltana Riucht law code (TITUS)
Notes
[edit]- ^ Hines, John; IJssennagger, Nelleke, eds. (2021). Frisians of the Early Middle Ages. Studies in historical archaeoethnology. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-78327-561-8. OCLC 1201655870.
- ^ a b Nedoma 2018, p. 882.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 16.
- ^ de Haan 2010, pp. 4, 25.
- ^ a b de Haan 2010, p. 25.
- ^ de Haan 2010, p. 26.
- ^ a b Bremmer 2009, p. 1.
- ^ a b Bremmer 2009, p. 2.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 6.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 6–7.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 7.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 8.
- ^ a b Bremmer 2009, pp. 7–8.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 30–32.
- ^ a b Bremmer 2009, pp. 36–37.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 29–30.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 30.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 33–35.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 35–36.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 32–33.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 27–29.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 42, 43.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 47.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 53.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 55–56.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 56.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, pp. 60–62.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 61.
- ^ Bremmer 2009, p. 62.
References
[edit]- Bremmer, Jr, Rolf H. (2009). An Introduction to Old Frisian: History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-9004-5.
- de Haan, Germen J. (2010). Studies in West Frisian Grammar: Selected papers. Linguistics Aktuell. Vol. 161. Eric Hoekstra, Willem Visser, Goffe Jensma (eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-8798-4.
- Hartmann, Frederik, Old Frisian breaking and labial mutation revisited. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2021.
- Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, eds. (11 June 2018). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-054052-9.
- Nedoma, Robert. "53. The documentation of Germanic". In Klein, Joseph & Fritz (2018), pp. 875–887.
Further reading
[edit]- Hofmann, Dietrich; Popkema, Anne Tjerk [in Western Frisian] (2008). Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch (in German). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. ISBN 978-3-8253-5555-5. OCLC 301547295.
