Old Frisian Language

Afin d’avancer dans la compréhension des relations intertextuelles entre les psautiers français médiévaux, il était essentiel de revenir à une source fondamentale telle que le Psautier d’Oxford (manuscrit d’Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 320). Ainsi, l’une des finalités du présent article est de jeter les bases d’une étude des altérations textuelles (représentées par de très nombreuses érasures) qui rendent compte du procédé rédactionnel et approfondissent la logique intrinsèque de ce manuscrit. L’étude étant de grande envergure, elle est segmentée en plusieurs publications. Dans cette première étape, après une introduction qui analyse les rapports du manuscrit Douce 320 avec d’autres codices de sa famille (e.g., Londres, British Library, Arundel ms 230), les auteurs discutent les érasures liés à la fluctuation de voyelles et diphtongues dans l’orthographe de certains mots. L’analyse du traitement des dentales finales occupe ensuite des sections concernant certaines formes verbales du mode indicatif, subjonctif et participe. Elle se complète par des approfondissements concernant le cas du -e- interconsonantique dans des formes futures et le choix entre -r- et double -rr- dans le futur du verbe estre. Encore, les érasures et/ou corrections liés aux dentales ont permis d’aborder la question de la déclinaison, non seulement dans le cas des participes, mais également dans le cas de plusieurs substantifs et adjectifs. L’étude porte ensuite sur des études de cas : l’effacement d’un –n final dans enfer(n), iur(n) et car(n) ; les hésitations du scribe liés à l’orthographe de la conjonction car ; le fréquent remplacement du q en c dans le mot quer/cuer ; le choix parfois hésitant entre les conjonctions mais et acertes ; ou bien les différents choix pour traduire le suffixe latin –tio. Une parenthèse ouverte sur certains ajouts et/ou corrections suggère la possibilité que le manuscrit Douce 320 pourrait ne pas être une traduction autographe du Psautier de St. Albans (ms Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, St Godehard 1) ; et que le scribe se serait plutôt servi d’une source latine avec une glose vernaculaire interlinéaire. Cette piste semble également confirmée par l’emploi du tiret bas, que le scribe utilise pour compenser des probables fautes de transcription. Mais elle est surtout soutenue dans la section où les auteurs s’arrêtent sur quelques « longues érasures », à savoir des unités de transcription dont l’émendation paraît liée à la structure et à l’interconnexion textuelle d’une source présentant à la fois latin et glose interlinéaire. En conclusion de cette partie, après avoir présenté, à titre comparatif, des exemples tirés du Psautier de Winchester et du Psautier d’Arundel, les auteurs proposent la reconstruction d’un segment textuel qui pourrait se rapprocher de la source du manuscrit Douce 320. L’article se termine par une comparaison avec les précédents vieil-anglais et une transcription des fragments de Maidstone, Centre d’histoire et bibliothèque de Kent, Fa/Z1 (fragment Faversham i). La continuation de la publication est prévue pour le prochain numéro Museikon.

Some Old Nordic words exhibit no continuity with their supposed regular development from proto-Germanic. They show correspondence neither to Old English, nor Old Saxon nor Gothic. The vocalic development of Old Frisian is the only one compatible with the features of those words. Should we then consider them exceptions or possibly loanwords from early Old Frisian? My purpose is to outline a corpus of early Old Frisian loanwords in North Germanic, based on a phonological criterion.

The relationship between Old Nordic bākn 'fire beacon', pre-Old Frisian *bākən 'id.' and Germanic *baugō-, *baukkaz 'ring' The aim of this presentation is to highlight the connection between Old Nordic *bākn 'fire beacon' and pre-Old Frisian *bākən 'id.' from Gmc *baukna-. In this paper it is assumed that Germanic *baukna-is a thematization of the older n-stem *baugō-, *baukkaz 'ring'. Thus, the whole etymological cluster would be: 'which bends round', 'ring', 'round container for burning wood' and finally-'fire beacon'.

Some Old Nordic words exhibit no continuity with their supposed regular development from proto-Germanic. They show correspondence neither to Old English, nor Old Saxon nor Gothic. The vocalic development of Old Frisian is the only one compatible with the features of those words. Should we then consider them exceptions or possibly loanwords from early Old Frisian? My purpose is to outline a corpus of early Old Frisian loanwords in North Germanic, based on a phonological criterion.

The aim of this presentation is to highlight the connection between Old Nordic *bākn ‘fire beacon’ and pre-Old Frisian *bākən ‘id.’ from Gmc *baukna-.
In this paper it is assumed that Germanic *baukna- is a thematization of the older n-stem *baugō-, *baukkaz ‘ring’. Thus, the whole etymological cluster would be: ‘which bends round’, ‘ring’, ‘round container for burning wood’ and finally - ‘fire beacon’.

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This article offers a descriptive account of body part constructions in Old East Frisian texts and analyzes the occurrence of dative experiencers in such clauses. This includes a comparison between Old Frisian body part grammar and its Middle Dutch counterpart, revisiting issues such as the antiquity of dative external possessors and oblique subject constructions in West Germanic. In presenting the data from a theory-neutral perspective, this investigation contributes to the study of body part grammar in Medieval Germanic in particular and to the growing body of literature on Old Frisian syntax in general.

In her book Place-names in the landscape, Margaret Gelling advanced the hypothesis that one of the meanings of the Old English element Anglian halh, West Saxon and Kentish healh, was "slightly raised ground isolated by marsh, dry ground in marsh" (1984: 100–11). It is the purpose of this note to bring support for the conjecture from an unexpected quarter. 2. Off the west coast of the province of Schleswig-Holstein in what is now Germany lie a series of low-lying, undiked islands, known in standard German as Die Halligen. 1 The singular, Hallig F., is defined in Kluge's etymological dictionary as 'flache, gegen die Flut nicht geschützte Insel' (Kluge-Seebold 1989; 289). Although the word is attested in High German texts since 1758, it is in fact a loan-via Low German-from the North Frisian dialects of the region. Old Frisian does not attest the word, so it is known only in more modern times, from Danish, Low and High German sources as well as from the North Frisian dialects themselves. In High German, the word is known only as a propername, but in North Frisian, Low German, and Danish dialects it also occurs as a common-noun meaning not only "small low-lying undiked island" but also "land lying seaward of a dike [not necessarily forming part of an island]" 2. As such, it appears in numerous field names.

This article describes onomasiological explorations of Old Frisian and Old English lexis in the semantic field of KINSHIP through a novel, digital approach. In connecting Old Frisian lexis, drawn from the Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch (AFWB), to the overarching structure of A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), a dataset has been created that shares a semantic framework with the one existing for Old English lexis. The connected resources are shared and analysed using the web application Evoke. Statistical data provided by this tool, such as the degree of lexicalization for this field, facilitates comparative analyses of the two historical languages. As this article demonstrates, the reuse of the onomasiological macrostructure of TOE offers new insights into linguistic and cultural aspects of these two languages and their language communities.

This paper comes as a response to some reviews of my book _Hir is eskriven_ (2004), especially those by Henk Meijering and Anne Popkema. I begin by explaining the topic of my book: the beginnings of literacy in medieval Frisia. It grew from a curiosity that was kindled in my student days but which I was unable to satisfy using the literature available to me then or subsequently. In my discussion of Meijering's review I challenge his claim that the phrase 'written law' in medieval Frisian sources refers to Romano-canonical law. Frisian law, according to Meijering, would be referred to as 'speaking'. I show that a 'speaking' text follows the style figure of prosopopoeia, which authors of legal treatises demonstrably use also for quotations from Romano-canonical sources. Popkema questioned the validity of my arguments for dating the vernacular versions of the major Frisian law texts to after the turn of the 13th century (instead of before). Here I present some new arguments and considerations for my dating. I furthermore reconsider my hypothesis that the oldest Frisian law texts were translated from Latin but concede with Popkema that some of my arguments are weak. I also refute some of Popkema's other (over)critical remarks. Toen de kopiist van het Eerste Rüstringer Handschrift klaar was met zijn werk, sloot hij af met een vierregelig gedichtje, waarvan de eerste regel luidt: Explicit expliceat, ludere scriptor eat. 'Het is af, en laat het af zijn, de schrijver mag gaan spelen'. Misschien heb ik dat ook wel gedacht, toen ik de kopij van Hir is eskriven naar de uitgever stuurde. De eerste recensies hebben me evenwel duidelijk gemaakt dat, als ik al was gaan spelen, het speelkwartier nu wel weer voorbij is. In het nu volgende stuk zal ik eerst enige toelichting geven op de ontstaansgeschiedenis en doel van het boek. Vervolgens zal ik ingaan op enkele punten van kritiek die, naast veel waar-dering, in recensies naar voren zijn gebracht.

The investigation  focuses on the survival of IE vocabulary in OFris and what will be stressed is the maintenance of words of the IE stock, which, if their occurrence is isolated in Gmc, can be con¬sidered to be archaisms. It is probably better not to call even such terms “archaic”, but rather to regard them as conservative of the so¬called “IE compact lexicon” (i.e. the set of words which have a con¬tinuation in every IE language or in many of them). In these in¬stances OFris is conservative both with regard to Gmc as well as IE. Besides all the IE words which have a continuation in Gmc, there are also in OFris, a number of words of supposed non IE stock, whose origin has been sought in the language of an earlier stratum, of population. Many OFris words cannot be traced back to IE and may belong to a substratum  or may rather represent innovations in Gmc.

On Old English net, max and other terms for ‘net’]
Il saggio prende in esame tutte le occorrenze di due parole dell’antico inglese, col significato di ‘rete’, net e max. Numerose sono le occorrenze di net e dei suoi composti; la voce, di origine ie, ricorre in tutte le lingue germaniche antiche. La voce max ha invece un numero limitato di occorrenze ed è priva di confronti diretti in ambito germanico. Ricorre tre volte in antico inglese, tutte nel Colloquio di Ælfric. Si studiano anche gli altri termini per ‘rete’ in antico inglese, le loro accezioni e le loro continuazioni in medio inglese.

The Brokmerbref and the Emsigo Compensation Tariff concerning arson provide a number of occurrences of the word krocha, otherwise unrecorded in Old Frisian, in the meaning ‘coal pan’. Yet the Modern Frisian dialect words denote different sorts of cooking pots either earthen or metal and apparently do not support the specialized meaning of the Old Frisian. Coal pans were quite common in medieval times, however, and the legal provisions under examination provide both homely and lively descriptions of arson, possibly based on actual cases. Medieval iconography of the devil as arsonist – portrayed with a coal pan in his hand – assists the interpretation of krocha, which goes back to Richthofen, and adds a further negative tinge to the crime of arson, harshly sanctioned by Old Frisian laws.

The essay takes into examination the interlinear glosses in Old Frisian in the fragment of Psalter in ms. Groningen, Universiteitsbibliotheek 404. This is the oldest medieval Frisian fragmentary codex to survive and contains verses of Psalms XVII, XXVII, and XVIII, accompanied by glosses in the vernacular. This essay is the first lengthy study specifically devoted to the typology of the glosses themselves and their peculiarities (within the field of interlinear glosses). On close inspection, the OF glosses show a large internal coherence and individual quality. As far as the lexicon is concerned, the glosses feature a series of words belonging to the juridical lexicon, whereas other word-choices betray a keen attention to building techniques and buildings themselves. In a number of instances, it is evident that the glossator has tried to reproduce the structure of the Latin word, in general a verb. Among the other relevant features is the glossator’s penchant for simplifying the language of the Latin Psalms, toning down the biblical speech. A feature, which seems typical of this fragmentary gloss, is the use of periphrasis instead of a single word to render a particularly complex lemma of the Latin. The omission of a number of renderings seems intentional and is carried out regularly. The choice to include in the text only the most relevant information helps to explain the most striking feature of these in-text glosses (as far as unglossed words are concerned): the omission of the demonstrative and possessive adjectives. The renderings of the Psalters are compared with other interlinear glosses to the Psalter, i.e. those in Old English. The essay has been reviewed by the Scientif Committee of the Journal "Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik” and the editorial board of the volume published by Rodopi (Amsterdam/New York), which features the contributions of the twenty-plus international authors and is devoted to Old Frisian philology. The book is a monographic number of the Journal “Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik”.

The essay takes into examination the words for ‘sailor’ in the Germanic languages, with particular regard to those going under the sobriquet of North Sea Germanic languages. The research begins with the lida of Maxims I and his safe return home. As with OE lida and līðend, nomina agentis from verbs of motion turn out to be among the most frequent formations for ‘sailor’, both in OE and many other Germanic languages. The research does not yield a common stock of Germanic words, but for the cognates of OE scipmann and sǣmann, that, however, are not recorded in all the Germanic languages. As to the līðend-compounds, their occurrence in more than one language might be due to the influence of OE models on both OS and OHG poetry. On the other hand, it emerges that the same (morphologic and semantic) patterns are constantly drawn upon. This produces a number of the words for ‘sailor’, revealing a process of invention of ever new compounds that apparently moves along traditional lines.

The article considers the NATURE of the close relationship of English and Frisian. Using runological and linguistic arguments, it concludes that they shared significant isoglosses in the West Germanic dialect continuum, but did not pass through an exclusive common proto-stage in a stemmatic sense. The position of Old Saxon is also considered.

This article offers a phonological analysis of the vowel system of Runic Frisian (6th-9th c.) in stressed syllables. By using the most reliable attestations and taking them at face value, a vowel system emerges that can be the ancestor of all the later attested Frisian varieties, including the rather deviating Insular North Frisian dialects. The position of PGerm. *ē1 remains unclear due to scarcity of the data. In the short vowel system, the most outstanding features are the separation of fronted PGerm. *a from PGerm. *e (as is also the case in Old English). The most outstanding outcome in the long vowel system is the development of PGerm. *ai. Current  econstructions treat its monophthongisation as one process, contemporaneous with or even preceding the monophthongisation of PGerm. *au. This analysis proposes an early date of monophthongisation of PGerm. *ai in velar contexts and of PGerm. *au, and a later date of monophthongisation of PGerm. *ai in other contexts. The emigration of Frisians to the North Frisian islands in the 7th/8th century is positioned between those two stages. This reconstruction solves a long-standing problem in the historical phonology of Frisian, most prominent in the developments in Insular North Frisian and reconciles the main-stream opinions with a chronology of events as proposed by Hofmann (1964).