LL-L "History" 2005.10.08 (02) [E]

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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   L O W L A N D S - L * 08 October 2005 * Volume 02
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From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
Subject: LL-L "History" 2005.10.07 (07) [E]

Hi, Ingmar,

you wrote:

> I've always thought that the Frisians migrated to North Frisia many
> centuries later than the Saxons left for England, maybe 500 or more years
> between both events.

It's not North Frisia I'm writing about. I just mentioned it in this
context, but it may have run differently there.

My home region is the marshland at the estuary of the Elbe- and the
Weser-river, and the inhabitants (dominatingly Saxons) had left their early
settlings at ca. A.D. 500 - maybe some 50 or more years before or
thereafter.
The Frisians came at ca. A.D. 700; that is a proved fact for the area of
'Land Wursten' on the eastern side of the Weser-river.

Greater parts of the land which now is a whole, protected by dikes, formerly
was an  uncountable accumulation of islands, and it took several hundred
years of sedimentical movements, partly supported by mencraft, to become a
coherent unit.

> And remember that Old Saxon was a very "ingvaeonic"
> language itself, not less than Frisian, so words of this type in present
> day Saxon areas can be relicts of Old Saxon, or Frisian loans from much
> later.

Yes- I'm very aware of this. There have been several batches of immigration
of 'Hollandish' people later- beginning in the 12. and ending in the 18.
century. Partly you still today can find out the areas they came in; they
kept some traditions, and you find some LS-words over here which clearly are
of Western-LS origin.
But there are some location names and historical theories and sagas that
point to Frisian influence from the times before A.D. 1000.
In my home village (to a great extend it kept to be an isolated network of
islands up to the 14. century) a special, privilegued group of people were
called _Erbsaten_ till the end of the 18. century, unlikely to the
sorrounding area where the same people were named _Erbexen_ (from OSaxon
'ekson', G: 'besitzen; zu Eigen sein/haben', E: 'to own').

BTW: in the above mentioned 'Land Wursten' (they called themselves
_Wurtsaten_; look above) Frisian influences regarding language, customs and
(location) names are still very alive, though it is a small area of about 30
km in length and just 4-9 km in width. But this isn't typically, because it
was a real Frisian enclave with enduring relations to their homelands at the
western side of the Weser river.

> Old Saxon is not the direct ancestor of what is called Low Saxon
> nowadays, because it was Franconized so thoroughly that it lost almost all
> the ingvaeonic features.

... but less along the coasts?! I can't see any 'unique' Low Saxon today,
and I doubt that it ever had been.
And Old Saxon? Just a handful of reliable, but fragmentary sources there
are, and the Saxons were spread from the Danish border down to Burgundy,
from the Elbe to any mystical "Lands End". I don't think them to have
carried with them a *Saxon Duden* or *OSD* ('Old Saxon Dictionary')
throughout their long journeys ;-).
In that 'true' Old Saxon-times they already made very different evolutions
in social structures even within continental Europe. Has there at any time
existed something like a real homogenuous language as *the one* ancestor of
LS?

Greutens/Regards

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: History

Ingmar:

> Old Saxon is not the direct ancestor of what is called Low Saxon
> nowadays, because it was Franconized so thoroughly that it lost almost all
> the ingvaeonic features.

That sounds like an overstatement to me.  What would the ancestor be then? 
Are you then, for the sake of consistency, saying that Old English is not 
the direct ancestor of Modern English and Scots because of strong 
Scandinavian and even stronger and transforming French influences?  Is 
Vulgar Latin not the ancestor of French because of Celtic substrates and 
influences, and not of Romanian either because of strong Slavonic, Hungarian 
and Greek influences, and Old Turkic is not the ancestor of the Turkic 
languages because of strong Iranian and other types of substrates and 
influences?

You need to keep influences within the development of a language apart from 
the ancestry issue.  Loss of a certain number of Inveonisms (many of which 
survive in competition, e.g., _us_ ~ _uns_) should not be taken as an 
indicator of wholesale transformation -- and even if it were, it still would 
not change the ancestry.

Yes, Frankish overlordship did take its toll on the development of Saxon, as 
did Germanization and Neerlandization in the more recent past.  But as far 
as I am concerned, Old Saxon is still the ancestor.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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