Frisian: Forgotten Sister Language

hi I'm historical linguist and especially Old North specialist Dr Jackson Crawford from time to time particular subjects in historical Linguistics crop up a lot in questions and uh I can never exactly tell why maybe because some factoid has been shared somewhere that a lot of people have seen but lately I've been seeing a lot of questions about frion so probably somewhere recently the semi famous factoid famous if you've ever taken an interest in in language study that Fran is the closest language to English has been it's been shared somewhere now is this true yes in a historical context the last language to break off of the tree in the same place as English is Fran unless you count Scots or quote unquote Scottish English is a separate language from English which many authorities do in which case Scots would then be the closest language to English but a lot of people don't want to count that because they can understand understand Scots whereas frisan is more distinctly a different language by the way there's a lot of Scots reallya couldn't understand but you know what I mean people don't want to think of Scottish not Scots galic but the English like language spoken in Scotland as a separate language from English now Fran being a recent Le relatively speaking split off language from the same branch of the tree as English that does not mean that frison is going to be an easier language for you to learn than any other language in fact I would say that a slightly more distant relation to English that's a little bit more grammatically regular something like Norwegian or Swedish is a little bit easier for an English speaker to learn frish like Dutch has some quote unquote irregularities that uh can be real stumbling blocks for Learners and though there's not a huge amount of resources for learning frion there are some things out there on the web these days uh and there's a reasonably large body of speakers out there something like you know I think a little under half a million so it might be comparable to the base of speakers for something like Icelandic maybe even a little bit more than Icelandic well in this video what I'm going to do is share a little bit about fren focusing a bit more on Old frisan because that's a little bit more what I'm professionally acquainted with and some of its connections to English and Norse or lack of Connections in a couple interesting cases and uh a little bit about some resources if you have some more interest in this close relative of [Music] English [Music] [Music] so what is frion in the first place well we have to kind of let go of our simplified picture of language in Europe that often puts one set of borders with one flag together with one language the history of that continent like of all continents is much more linguistically complicated than that and historically where one language is spoken and another one isn't has shifted U kaleidoscopically so if we go back about let's say let's start off about 2,000 years ago when the Germanic languages were still more or less a unitary phenomenon but starting to dialectically diverge we have Gothic of the attested languages probably diverging earliest as the Goths move to the South now Gothic is also the earliest one attested in a lot of ridden remnants so we are privileged to see um a much earlier stage of a Germanic language in Gothic than we see in the written forms of most of the other languages and then gradually as the other dialects as speakers of the other dialects lose touch with one another spread out their dialects diverge more and more and start trending toward the modern spoken languages so another early diverger is the ancestor of high German um which does not mean you know better German but German of the the Highland so there's a high German Sound shift that affects those dialects including standard German of today that doesn't affect the other Germanic languages that's a very early uh major Divergence and there's also an early pulling apart of the so-called West Germanic and North Germanic languages with the north Germanic languages being represented by in the early centuries what we can call proton Norse later by Old Norse the language of the Vikings and of the ad and sagas and then that will eventually become the Scandinavian languages of the West Germanic languages we have moving from kind of roughly north to south the ancestors of Old English old frian old Saxon which is not the same as quotequote Anglo-Saxon Old English it's a language on the continent ancestral to Modern low German German and the lowlands um old low franconian so the franconian dialects of West romantic that ultimately ancestral to Dutch and thre It Off cons and then finally highy German old Hy German the West Germanic dialects that are further north have more features in common with North Germanic it's not a completely cut and dry line where you can say you know like North geric over here West geric over here there's kind of a shaded area where some quote unquote North dramtic features are in West dramatic language especially Northern dialects of English and to some extent old Fran um but once the Angles and sax and some Saxons and Judes and probably some frians have moved from what is now Denmark and the North Sea Coast of Germany and the Netherlands to Britain and created a very geographically separate basis for the old English dialects to develop there's a little bit more of a Sharp dividing line between W dramatic and North dramatic after that probably uh part of what's happening there is that the Danes are increasingly uh moving south into more of what is today called Denmark after them um and covering over areas where westr Mantic languages had been spoken probably Proto English Proto Fran if there's even a different stream those at this time Proto Anglo frion uh or closer related dialects that are now extinct uh we see actually in a lot of Elder fuark the oldest form of the runic alphabet a lot of Elder fuar inscriptions in present day Denmark from early centuries we see names with West Germanic rather than North Germanic form showing that it was something more like English than like Proto old Proto English and like proton noris that was being spoken there okay after speakers of the dialects and cister Old English have moved to Britain there are still you know they don't they don't all leave not everyone speaking these Di leaves so some speakers of these Coastal North Sea Wester manic dialects remain behind on the coast of what's now the Netherlands and Germany and Denmark the the Northwestern Coast the North Sea Coast of these countries and separated from other West romantic dialect Speakers by marshes they their language develops in some respects uniquely relative to the ancestors of Dutch or of low German and their neighboring Wester Mantic languages so old frisan shows a lot of characteristics in common with Old English but also some characteristics that are its own unique individual developments right it's not the exact same thing as Old English all right so with all that little bit of historical background established let me give you a quick word from my friends and partners at grimfrost and I'll come back and show you some of the characteristics SS of old frisan not to teach you old frion obviously I can't do that in one video I am trying to teach you to read Old Norris in a zoom class that I'm starting in late January if you want to go learn to read that but I want to give you just some of the characteristics of it if you're interested in something like Old Norris Old English you can get a feel for old frisan and maybe how it's uh a little bit different a little bit the same as those [Music] so Scholars identify three dialects within old frisan that developed in the old frian period there's a West frian an East frisan and an island North Fran now today the dialect group with the most speakers is the West frisan group in the Netherlands the East frisan group in Germany is much more threatened in terms of speakers uh it speakers have switched much more completely over to German and then Island North frion which is spoken in islands off of the North Sea Coast of Germany uh is descended from that Old North frion and doesn't actually have much in common with Mainland North frion of today which is actually a group of dialects descended from old East frion so it's more like the east frion in further south in Germany now of the texts that are preserved in old frian the oldest are in Old East frian uh I should take a moment to point out that there are some runic inscriptions in old frian that are older than this if we go back to um you know the 500s to 800s ad roughly there uh a decent number of old Fran runic inscriptions there we see a language that's even more old english-like than what we called frion and manuscripts but there's not a huge number of texts or a huge variety of vocabulary to establish a lot about the characteristics of that early ruled frion at that stage with with with the term old frisan we're usually referring to the language of manuscripts in the 1200s to 400s written down in uh Frisian speaking communities so actually old frisan this is a a bone that a lot of linguists pick is more equivalent in Timeline to Middle English or middle high German uh but we speak of Old Norse still at this point the 1200s 1400s so it's not a completely unfair bit of terminology and the old frisan language at the stage is more archaic than say Middle English and in a lot of respects Middle High German so so it's it's still fair to call it old rather than middle if if those terms mean a lot to you now if you look at some of those really early old East version texts uh probably the most important manuscript of which is the first rring manuscript in Old East frisan you see some characteristics that in fact can look strikingly Norse uh one of the most striking to me is that the plural of masculine ostem dramatic aems is R like in Norse so for example Old Norse old islandic stain plural star is exactly paralleled by old Fran singular Stan plural Star Stones and in fact that Stan stenar looks exactly like uh old Swedish or modern Swedish Stone Stones another characteristic of old frisan that might make you think of Old Norse is the way that IM mutation patterns so that for example the verb far the same in Old Norris as in Old Fran to go to travel has uh in Old Fran present singular I far without IM mutation but then second through first and he F or he F in later text now in Old Norse that IM mutation gets extended to the first person singular eer rather then probably foru would be what we'd expect by uh regular historical change but um the pattern is similar to an earlier stage of old nors also that loss of w before a rounded vow like you rely see an Old Norris like e the although you don't always see that in Old frisan so for example in Old frisan you might see Ward word or ored looking more like old noris or but uh that W loss is not as consistent and old Fran as in Old nors now it should be pointed out that a feature like that plural R is not because of some shared period of development between old Fran and Old Norris it doesn't make them closer to one another than either one is to Old English rather it is a sound change that's happened in Old frian after it split from Old English just like that sound change happened independently in old nors it's a old Z that's going to R whereas that Z survives as an s in English in a plural like stones horses Etc now some of the features that stand out for showing the close relationship between Old English and old frisan are simply lexical some words that are the same or almost the same that aren't there in other Germanic languages U semi example is key is a word in Old nor in old frisan and old English but in uh other Germanic languages you see other words for example Old Norris Lil and there is a similar tendency in old frion and in old and later English to metathesis of R so for example through uh an English old frion although Old English you see th so old English has a non metathesized form what's happened is that English and frion Shar this tendency to metathesis but they don't have all these words metathesized at the same time um another one would be old fision B uh Old English bright versus old nor B non- metathesized uh I've wondered if English ours is an example of this our metathesis from uh Germanic uner uh where you've got an earlier phase it's like s after English and fan have lost that n in front of the S it's a regular change in English and Fran and Norse but you see English hours and old Fran Ursa also old Fran Berna and Old English burn versus for example old noris Brena with the non- metathesized r old fan loses the old reflexive personal pronoun Old Norris sik German Z which means himself herself itself so that's another uh uh big uh big big difference for example in the first ring manuscript you see sunand that God him resta Sunday when God rested him meaning rested himself and old Moors or in German you would need sik there Old English doesn't feature a lot of the dummy do verb that Modern English does but uh old Fran is starting to show the same tendency toward using a lot of do that Modern English does so for example in the first ring manuscript Thal then mon you shall not any uh you shall not do any manslaughter you should not murder it's of course from The Ten Commandments English and frisan share the unring of the long the IM mutation product of long o this is old noris long SL o likea from an older soia uh that is an English seek and an old fision sea uh we also see for example where Old Norris has F foot plural fo feet English has of course foot feet and old fisan also fot fate they share a conjunction made from the prefix B plus utan outside that is uh old frisan bhha and English but this conjunction is uh pretty pretty important in Ang frion and uh marginal If Not absent elsewhere in Germanic and we also see that old English and old Fran share a form of the personal pronoun for she that starts with H Hugh versus the S form in German and Dutch for example modern High German Z so those are some major major similarities Beyond uh I think those are sort of beyond the ones that you often see in in quick quick hit listicles about this which is funny I mean like who looks at quick hit listicles about the similarties between old things and old frion but they exist um one of the ones that you often do see mentioned is a uh common change of a to a and a lot of words giving frisan and English a lot of a sounds that are not there in other Wester manic languages now there are some significant differences to note I would note that though Old English and old version both palatalize K and G and a lot of the same environments before front vowels the SK cluster is not paliz in Old Fran so what is ship in Old English or Modern English is Skip in old frian as indeed it is in Old nors there is also a drift toward medial V becoming a U or W in frian uh this is a similar drift in Danish but what you'll see there is for example Modern English shove versus modern West frion scoa there's also a tendency for medial indd to become NG in Fran so uh English Thunder or in fact late old frisan Thunder is uh modern West Fran tonger and then like in German even though the uh s zik that reflexive pronoun is lost per se the possessive phenomenal adjective formed from it sin is still used and in fact it replaces the word his in frion so that instead of his you use sinen uh this of course looks like German but is quite different from what uh Old Norse or Old English would do now I've taken a fair amount of interest in Island North frion because it's the dialect that's had the most contact with u Old Norse and and its later descendants one of the most interesting things you'll see if you read some North frian and there is a North Fran New Testament that's easy to find online um is eek from Old Norse echi meaning not so the negative instead of being like English not or German n you know one of these these nword in starting words is uh from the the the Norse negative eki which is pretty cool uh there is a blog or something like that I think it was on blog spot and maybe later moved to Wordpress I think both forms of it still exist called Le sing in which you can learn um soling dialect one of the Island North Fran dialects which uh is pretty neat one of the neatest things about that is that at least until the early 20th century uh soling and many other Island North fishan dialects preserved The Duel as a separate class of personal pronouns uh from the plural so for example we to being a different word than uh just plural we yal to being a different word from plural yal meaning more than two use that I'm talking to intriguingly uh these Island North Fran dialects also developed an analogical they to which is not there in for example Old English or uh Old Norris where you just have the we to yal to forms there's no they to uh same thing in Gothic so that's an innovation the Dual is not only retained as a separate category but strengthened as a a separate category and gained uh a new member if you are interested in learning more about old frisan I recommend an introduction to Old frisan pretty obvious Title by Rolf H Brer Jr uh this was given to me as a gift 14 years ago when I took my qualifying exams for my PhD by uh one of the professors on my committee uh Rob Howell at the University of Wisconsin anyway it is I think the only real introduction to this language that you're going to get in English it covers grammar as well as uh having a reader with a lot of text and old Fran uh be warned that I don't think that this book is all that well organized and it could have really used another editor so the book May frustrates you at moments um I am trying not to be as frustrating in the Old Norse textbook that I'm putting together and testing right now in my old Norse class on Zoom uh but I really appreciate that Rolf M put this book together as it's a uh it fills a fills a niche that I don't think any other book fills well I hope that has been a somewhat interesting or useful whatever that means to you uh introduction to Fran Visa V especially Old English and Old Norse an interesting uh separate chapter in the history of the Germanic languages and for now from beautiful Colorado thanking patreon for your support for this Channel and everyone out there wishing you all the [Music] best

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 21,192

Keywords: education, norse, old, old norse, norse myth, norse mythology, odin, Óðinn, edda, havamal, hávamál, wanderer's havamal, wanderer's hávamál, viking, vikings, norse god, norse, gods

Id: IROPgZYKgkc

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024