Mutual Comprehensibility of Middle West Low Germanic

[Eduard Selleslagh]

At 18:14 3/12/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I have never heard that Kentish was particularly conservative.  It might
>have been more conservative grammatically than northern dialects, but its
>vowel system went through a number of changes in the OE period and in the ME
>period it tended to voice its fricatives (at least /f/ and /s/) initially.

>Whether this would make it mutually intelligible with Middle Dutch or not, I
>do not know, but I wouldn't think they would be and have never seen any
>evidence that says they were.  Most of the Middle Dutch I have worked with
>though has been from 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts and this might be
>later than you are thinking of.

With some guesswork, far less than half of it, I suppose. Older (say
pre-1200) MD texts are pretty scarce, and OD is extremely rare. 14th
century Dutch is already sufficiently comprehensible to modern Dutch
speakers, especially to those who can speak modern West-Flemish dialects
which are the most conservative ones, and in addition, MD is based upon
Middle West-Flemish dialect (e.g. Brugge, Damme).

Ed. Selleslagh