LL-L: "Language varieties" LOWLANDS-L, 05.JAN.2001 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: "Language varieties"

John Feather wrote:

> The implication of this seems to be that Old Frisian was
> extremely like the
> Anglo-Saxon languages spoken in the British Isles, but since
> we know almost
> nothing about it that can only be a supposition.

This is so, but it is an entirely reasonable supposition:
English and Frisian descended from a common ancestral language,
and where thus originally one and the same.  They would have
gradually diverged, although English changed more rapidly, due
to the extensive interaction with the Norse who settled in the
Danelaw, and to a lesser extent with the Normans.

I say to a lesser extent, because the Normans were few in number
and concentrated in the ruling class, whereas the Danelaw Norse
immigrated in large numbers, as farmers as well as rulers.

You can see the difference by looking at Old and Middle English
dialects:  textbooks typically present a sanatized, normed
Middle English, but when you look at the dialects, the Danelaw
dialects show the radical simplification of grammar, extensive
borrowings etc. whereas Wessex, which escaped Norse
colonization, only gradually gave up the OE grammar during the
Middle English period, and did not adopt the Norse words.
The Norman vocabulary slowly trickled down to the commoners in
all regions of England, but the contact was not extensive enough
to bring about much grammatical change that hadn't already
happened.  French word order like "court martial" for
"war-related court" etc. was restricted to set phrases; absolute
constructions like "Henry, being king and having bested his
foe..." derive from Latin.

An example: Caxton apologizes for the difficulty of a standard
orthography in his printing of Virgil's translated Aeneid 1490:
he tells of someone from north England who gets into a fight
with a Southern innkeeper by asking for eggs; she insists she
knows no French- finally she realizes he meant eyren.

Very little Old English from the Danelaw survives, so we have to
look mostly to Middle English.

> I therefore still
> find it difficult to see why Frisian, which developed under
> completely
> different geographical and social conditions, should change in
> such a way as
> to be similar to Middle English.

The conditions were not very different for commoners in Wessex
and Frisia--  they kept farming and had few outsiders settle
among them, so there was little to accelerate their divergence
beyond the normal rate;  in the Danelaw change did accelerate
considerably.
Also: even though English and Frisian were no longer developing
in lockstep, they and all the other Germanic languages continued
to follow similar trajectories: they all had heavily accented
first syllables and they all were spoken with equal number of
accented syllables per unit of time, thus they all tended to
slur unaccented syllables, thus all the Germanic languages have
slurred their endings independently of each other, and most
slurred unaccented vowels to schwa
Very isolated Iceland and the isolated high-Alpine Swiss
dialects have changed the slowest, but all the Germanic
languages have followed similar paths from their common starting
point.

In short:  Frisian did not change to become -more- like Middle
English at all, it became less and less like English with every
passing century:  Frisian and English had diverged from being
identical circa 400 AD to being merely similar by 1200.

> Stefan also wrote:
> >I cant' find confirmation of whether OE [ae] was written <ae>
> from the
> earliest times or not.  Kentish and Mercian OE routinely wrote
> <e> (thus deg
> instead of daeg for "day"). <
>
> I'm not sure whether by <ae> he means two separate letters or
> the ligature "aesc".

Either: whether the scribe connected the a and the e is less
important than that the scribe indicated a sound different from
a and e, and most particularly, to what extent <ae>, as one
letter or two, occurred in Old Saxon texts that were not
translations of OE originals.  You mention the runes, and indeed
the Angle-Saxons distinguished between aesc [ae] and ak [a], but
runes were not involved in the text in question.

Stefan Israel
stefansfeder at yahoo.com

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language varieties

Stefan,

> English and Frisian descended from a common ancestral language,
> and where thus originally one and the same.

Let me ask this again.  How can you be so sure, given the scarcity or absence
of information about the early language varieties?  Is there any actual proof
of this, or is this a perpetuated hypothesis?  What proof is there to show
that Frisian and English descended from a supposed common "Anglo-Frisian"
ancestor and that Old English is not a Friso-Anglo-Saxon creole?  Of course,
*all* of the languages we discuss here ultimately have a common ancestor.
What I am keen on finding out is how much validity there really is to assuming
an Anglo-Frisian subbranch.

Should Old English turn out to be a Frisian-based creole with Saxon, Anglian
and Jutish elements (much like Afrikaans starting out as a Dutch-based creole
with English, Malay, Khoi-San and Bantu elements, or Yiddish started out as a
German-based creole with Semitic and Slavic elements), would it then not be
more accurate to say that there is no Anglo-Frisian subbranch but simply a
Frisian subbranch from which not only the various Frisian varieties descended
but secondarily also the various English and Scots varieties?  In that case,
it would be a question of terminological accuracy.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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