Frisian 9783110815719, 9789027931283

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Frisian

Trends in Linguistics State-of-the-Art Reports 13 Editor

Werner Winter

Mouton Publishers

The Hague · Paris · New York

Frisian by

T. L. Markey

Mouton Publishers The Hague · Paris · New York

This work was supported by a grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-23627-76-827)

ISBN: 90-279-3128-3 © 1981, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Symbols List of Maps

7 7 7

Foreword

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1

Introduction 1.1 Historical Development 1.2 The Position of Frisian within Germanic 1.3 The Periodization of Frisian 1.4 The Frisian Speech Community: Past and Present

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Old 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Frisian The Emergence of Frisian as a Literary Language The Origin of Old Frisian Manuscripts From West Germanic to Old Frisian Phonology Vowels Vowels in Unstressed Position 2.6.1 Final Position 2.6.2 Intermediary Position and Suffixes 2.6.3 Prefixes 2.7 Consonants 2.7.1 Auslautverhärtung 2.8 Morphology 2.9 Nouns 2.10 Adjectives 2.11 Comparison 2.12 Adverbs 2.13 Numerals 2.14 Pronouns 2.14.1 Personal Pronouns 2.14.2 The Demonstrative Pronoun and Definite Article 2.14.3 The Deictic Pronoun 'this' 2.14.4 Interrogative Pronouns

11 11 17 40 45 52 52 68 105 108 Ill 113 113 114 115 116 118 119 119 124 127 127 128 131 131 135 136 136

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3

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5 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2.14.5 Pronominal Adjective 2.14.6 Relative Pronouns 2.14.7 Indefinite Pronouns 2.15 Verbs 2.15.1 Present Indicative 2.15.2 Infinitive 2.15.3 Gerund 2.15.4 Present Participle 2.15.5 Preterite Indicative 2.15.6 Optative 2.15.7 Past Participle 2.15.8 Strong Verbs 2.15.9 Weak Verbs 2.15.10 Preterite-Present Verbs 2.15.11 The Verb 'to be' 2.15.12 The Verb 'will' 2.15.13 So-Called "Contract Verbs" 2.16 Syntax 2.16.1 Cases 2.16.2 Adjectives 2.16.3 Pronouns 2.16.4 Verbs

137 137 137 138 139 139 140 140 140 140 141 141 150 155 159 160 162 164 167 169 170 171

Modern Frisian 3.1 Modern West Frisian Dialects 3.2 From Old Frisian to Modern West Frisian 3.3 Position and Function of Modern West Frisian 3.4 Survey of Post-Classical West Frisian Literature 3.5 North Frisian Dialects 3.6 Position and Function of North Frisian 3.7 North Frisian Literature 3.8 East Frisian 3.9 Saterlandic Frisian Studies 4.1 A Brief History of Scholarship 4.2 Onomastics Bibliography Index of Names

173 173 187 202 206 209 247 248 250 254 258 258 263 269 331

Abbreviations C ClOFr. = Eng. = Fr. Ger. = Gmc. = Goth. = Hel. = Hi. IE KlFr. = Lat. MDu. = ME MLat. = MLG = MS(S) = NFr. = NKlFr. = OE

consonant Classical Old Frisian English Frisian German Germanic Gothic Helgoland(ic) Hindeloopen Indo-European Klei-Frisian Latin Middle Dutch Middle English Middle Latin Middle Low German manuscript (s) North Frisian North Klei-Frisian Old English

OEFr. OFr. OHG OIc. OS OSw. OWFr. PClOFr. PGmc. R S Sat. Sch. St. SWFr. SWH Tsc. V W WFr.

Old East Frisian Old Frisian Old High German Old Icelandic Old Saxon Old Swedish Old West Frisian Post-Classical Old Frisian Proto-Germanic Ramsloh Scharrel Saterland(ic) Schiermonnikoog Strucklingen Standard West Frisian South West Hook Terschelling vowel Wangerooge Waden Frisian

Symbols II

> Asterga > Ostergo, cf. Wistrachia > Westräch > Westergä > Westergo. Thus, according to Classical authorities, the Frisians inhabited the area between the Rhine or Scheldt in the west and the Ems or Weser in the east. Their neighbors to the east between the Weser and the Elbe in presentday Niedersachsen are said to have been the Chaukians. Further inland to the west were the Brukterians, the Usipetians, the Tenkterians, and the Sigamberians, who presumably occupied the area between the Lippe and the Sieg, see Maps 1 and 2. The Frisii were supposedly one of a number of West Germanic tribes including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Cheruskians, and Chaukians who inhabited the area along the North Sea coast and who, in accordance with Tacitus's tripartite division of the West Germanic tribes into Herminonen, Istvaeonen, and Ingvaeonen (proximi Oceano Ingaevones, Germ. II), are termed Ingvaeonic. The Ingvaeonic tribes are said to have worshipped the god Ingvi, cf. OIc. Yngvifreyr < Gmc. *Ingwiafraujaz 'lord of the Ingviones'. It cannot be definitively established that the medieval Frisians are the direct descendants of the Classical Frisii, and the term Frisian probably designated different things at different periods: a geographical area, a loosely knit hegemony of related tribes, see E. H. WATERBOLK (1963), REIMERS (1925), HACHMANN-KOSSACKKUHN (1962). Just as the term may have had a different semantic content at different times in this early period, so the geographical area of the Frisian speech community must have varied, now expanding, now contracting like the undulations of an accordion. Although the precise

INTRODUCTION

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meaning of the incolent collective *fres-/fris-ja is disputed, a plausible etymology is that it is related to OFr. frisle/ fresle 'lock of curly hair', e.g. Asterga Law: iefta frowen hiare freslan offe kerth, cf. Engl. frizzle, and *Frisjos might have designated 'those with curly hair', cf. Langobardian 'the long beards' and Vandal < *wand-ila- 'the short beards', the traditional enemies of the Langobardians. Thus, Frisian may have been a generic tribal name employed as a place name to designate the area(s) they inhabited. With the obvious exception of the Saxons, little is known of their neighbors. Pliny considered the Chaukians Ingvaeonic, and Tacitus praised their military proficiency. In the third century A.D. they are reported to have undertaken military campaigns in Roman territory, and then they disappear from history. Their ancestral territory was then occupied by the Saxons in the course of their victorious expansion southward into northern Germany, so that the Saxons and Frisians became competitive contiguous neighbors. The Frisians are last mentioned in Roman sources from the end of the third century A.D., and they are not mentioned again in historical sources until the end of the 7th century when they came into contact with the Franks as a result of Frankish expansion northward. During the period of Roman supremacy (12 B.C. — c. 250 A.D.), it appears that the Frisians were only slightly Romanized culturally and that a state of mutual independence existed between the two, though the Frisians were economically tied to the Romans. Frisian legal texts, compiled at a much later date, show hardly any traces of influence from Roman law. In the Merovingian and Carolingian periods the Frisians once more emerge as an historically documented people. In 689 the Frisian king, Redbad, was defeated by Pippin at Dorestad. After the death of Pippin in 714, Redbad

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INTRODUCTION

managed, however, to regain some of his territorial losses but was defeated in 719 by Charles Martell, who then acquired the majority of Frisian territory south of the Netherlands in 734. Formerly Frisian territory was then divided into West Friesland between Sincfal and the Vlie, Middle Friesland between the Vlie and the Lauwerzee, and East Friesland between the Lauwerzee and the Weser, see BARKER (1962). The Franks provided the Frisians protection from the Vikings, but the protection afforded was short-lived. A violent attack on Friesland was launched in 810 and in 834 the Danes captured Franco-Frisian Dorestad, then the largest and most important commerical center in northern Europe. The Danish chief, Rorik, settled in Friesland c. 850 whence he pillaged Canterbury and London. The coast of Friesland was attacked again in 934 by Gnupa, the Swedish king at Hedeby, and the Viking raids finally ceased c. 1100. In the 8th century the Frisians had conducted extensive trade relations with Sweden in the Birka settlement, but it appears that the Frisians were more subject to Scandinavian linguistic influence than vice versa as a result of this contact situation (see BORCHLING 1938 and 1.2). Scandinavian-Frisian language contact during this period was reciprocal in nature, but predominantly Scandinavian in degree. Frisian influence on Scandinavian was primarily lexical, e.g. OIc. bakn < OFr. bäken < *baukna-, while Scandinavian influence on Frisian was primarily morphological, e.g. the Old Frisian nom. pi. masc. in -ar/er < Scandinavian -ar. It was during the Carolingian period that the Frisians consolidated their role as important seafaring traders, a position they were to occupy throughout the Middle Ages, and that Christianity was introduced, though initial efforts by Anglo-Saxon missions to convert the Frisians ended in disaster with the slaying of St. Bonifacius on June 5, 754, near Dokkum. It was also during this period that the

INTRODUCTION

MAP 1 Germanic Tribes c. 100 A.D.

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INTRODUCTION

first codification of the Frisian laws was carried out, for it is presumably from the year 802 that the Lex Frisionum stems, possibly at the behest of Charlemagne. The Westergo and Ostergo areas began to be diked in around the ancient terpen 'elevated clay mounds', cf. Scandinavian torp, German Dorf, on which the first settlements had been established. With the breakup of the Frankish empire in the 9th century, the Frisian area became part of the East Frankish empire. The Frisian area was then divided into West, Middle, and East Friesland. East Friesland comprised the area between the Ems and the Jadebusen and included the provinces of Emsingerland, Brokmerland, Noderland, Harlingerland, Reiderland, Mormerland, Ostringen, Wangerland, and Rüstringen. Middle Friesland included the modern Dutch province of Friesland and the northern portion of the province of Groningen, while West Friesland included the northern portion of the Dutch province of North Holland, see Maps 5 and 13. In 1289 West Friesland came under the dominion of the Counts of Holland, and the area subsequently became Dutch. Middle Friesland managed to assert its political independence in the 13th and 14th centuries, and a series of agrarian states was formed which were temporarily united by the Upstalsbom Treaty (see 2.2). The subsequent history of these areas is reviewed in brief in 1.4, as it is intimately tied to linguistic history. The settlement history of the North Frisian area is a much debated matter. There are extensive linguistic and cultural differences between the island dialects on the one hand and the mainland dialects on the other. J0RGENSEN (1946: 146-7) concludes that Fohr and Amrum are old, original settlements, while the mainland was settled later (c. 500-1000) from the south. JANKUHN (1960), however, believes that the islands were settled in the 7th-8th centuries,

INTRODUCTION

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while the mainland was settled in the lOth-llth centuries. The linguistic differences between these two areas are enormous on every level, and the problem of their settlement history is far from conclusively decided at the present time»

1.2 THE POSITION OF FRISIAN WITHIN GERMANIC Frisian is a member of the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic group of West Germanic dialects. In addition to Frisian, this macro-dialectal subgroup of West Germanic includes Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, its medieval descendant, Middle Low German, and Dutch as a pivotal, partially Ingvaeonic dialect (Old Low Franconian, Middle and Modern Dutch). With the inclusion of Old Saxon — Middle Low German in the Ingvaeonic sub-group we must necessarily make a careful distinction between so-called "genuine" Old Saxon, which reflects grammatical features typical of Ingvaeonic, and Old Saxon proper, which was heavily influenced by Frankish. In this definitional sense the most extensive attestation of Old Saxon, the Heliand, is, unfortunately for comparative purposes, the least "genuine" of all Old Saxon documents. The Ingvaeonic dialect most closely related to Frisian on every linguistic level is AngloSaxon, and their clearly recognizable linguistic affinities induced OTTO BREMER and THEODOR SIEBS (1889, 1901) to postulate a common ancestor termed AngloFrisian, but subsequent scholarship has rejected this collective common ancestor: the two dialects exhibit enough fundamentally divergent phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactical features to obviate a thesis of common primordial ancestry; rather they are the most closely related dialects of the Ingvaeonic group. Postulation of an Ingvaeonic subgroup has itself engendered scholarly debate which has typically centered around

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INTRODUCTION

two major issues: 1) whether or not Ingvaeonic was a relatively uniform, distinctive dialectal entity on the Continent prior to the departure of the Ango-Saxons for Britain c. 450-500 A.D. or 2) whether or not the putative individuality of Ingvaeonic resulted from continued language contact over the North Sea after the departure of the AngloSaxons which forged it into a comparatively homogeneous macro-dialectal block, see MARKEY (1976a). In defining Ingvaeonic and the position of Frisian within this major subgroup of West Germanic, we are, of course, faced with the general problems associated with linguistic typology and the determination of dialectal relationship (s); namely, the evaluation of innovation, retention, and uniqueness, the development of a feature in one and only one subgroup or dialect, as primary definitional criteria. We regard archaic morphological innovations as the ultimate test of relationship and common development. In embracing a compromise of positions (1) and (2) as outlined above, we have extricated ourselves from the characteristically thorny question of deciding whether or not identical innovations in related but discontiguous dialects result from dependent or independent developments. We opt for a position of dependent development as implied by the formulation of these positions. Advocation of independence in developing identical innovations necessarily carries with it the implication that independent realization of identical innovations is due to latent general tendencies in the parent language or dialect. Invocation of the latent tendencies (common predisposition) argument often degenerates into a specious mentalistic playground in which extra-linguistic similarities such as climate and cultural heritage are fallaciously adduced. In defining the dialectal position of Frisian, we shall review characteristically Ingvaeonic features and, where pertinent, comparable North Germanic features, as well as

INTRODUCTION

MAP 2 The North Sea Germanic Speech Community

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INTRODUCTION

instances of reciprocal North Sea Germanic — North Germanic linguistic influence in an effort to determine further linguistic affinities in the North Sea area, the Germanic mare nostrum. The list of features given below cites innocations and retentions generally considered specifically Ingvaeonic. The list also includes Ingvaeonic features not shared by Frisian, as well as features of "uniqueness" which are exclusively Frisian. 1) Shift of Gmc. a > ae/e in closed syllables: OLF uuat, MDu. vat vs. OFr. fet, OE faet, OS gles. In Old Frisian and Old English this rule did not apply before nasals and only sporadically before r, h, L It appears likely that this change was carried out independently in Old English and Old Frisian subsequent to monophthongization of Gmc. ai, see CAMPBELL (1964: Arts. 132, 139, 157, 164, 185, 191). 2) Unconditional monophthongization of Germanic ai: OLF ez'/