Frisian

[Jasmin Harvey]

At 06:18 PM 1/27/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Ed Selleslagh writes,

>>I'm anything but a specialist in Frisian, but I hear and read some from
>>time to time.

>Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you know anything about the
>distribution of Frisian in medieval times. I've read that it extended over
>more of the Netherlands than currently, and also towards Denmark.

>Max Dashu

Yes, it extended in its greatest range from the Weser to the Rhine along
the North Sea Coast, just before Charlemagne came along.  Currently most of
West Frisian is in the province of Friesland, in the Netherlands, while
North Frisian is along some of the west coast and islands off Denmark, and
the little remains of East Frisian are around Saterland in Germany.  For
rather full reference, with maps, I'd refer you to Thomas Markey's 1981
_Frisian_ (Trends in Linguistics: State of the Art Reports 13), The
Hague/Paris/New York: Mouton Publishers.  For a briefer overview, the
chapter on Frisian in Orrin Robinson's 1992 _Old English and its Closest
Relatives_, Stanford: Stanford UP is pretty good.

Jasmin Harvey
Rolfe-Campbell GTC/
Germanic Linguistics, UCLA
jharvey at ucla.edu