Old Frisian

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Old Frisian

Old Frisian was the West Germanic language

West Germanic languages

The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic languages family of languages and include languages such as English language, Dutch language and Afrikaans, German language, the Frisian languages, as well as Yiddish language....
spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries by the people who had settled in the area between the Rhine

Rhine

File:Swiss Grand Canyon.jpgThe Rhine is one of the longest and most important rivers in Europe, at , with an average discharge of more than ....
and Elbe

Elbe

The River Elbe is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It originates in the Krkonose Mountains of northwestern Czech Republic before traversing much of Germany and flowing into the North Sea....
on the European North Sea

North Sea

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
and Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
. The language of the earlier inhabitants of the region (the Frisians

Frisians

The Frisians are an ethnic group of Germanic people living in coastal parts of The Netherlands and Germany. They are concentrated in the Dutch provinces of Friesland and Groningen and, in Germany, East Frisia and North Frisia....
famously mentioned by Tacitus

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman Senate and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories —examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those that reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors....
) is not attested. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian

Middle Frisian

Middle Frisian evolved from Old Frisian from the 16th century and was spoken until ca. 1820, considered the beginning of the Modern period of the Frisian languages....
spoken from the 16th to the 19th century.

During the whole of the Middle Ages, Fryslân stretched from the area around Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....
, in what is now Belgium

Belgium

* A small German-speaking Community of Belgium exists in eastern Wallonia. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political and cultural conflicts are reflected in the history of Belgium and a complex Communities and regions of Belgium....
, to the river Weser, in northern Germany

Germany

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Old Frisian was the West Germanic language

West Germanic languages

Rhine

File:Swiss Grand Canyon.jpgThe Rhine is one of the longest and most important rivers in Europe, at , with an average discharge of more than ....
and Elbe

Elbe

North Sea

Germany

Denmark

Frisians

Tacitus

Middle Frisian

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....
, in what is now Belgium

Belgium

Germany

North Sea

The North Sea is a marginal sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf. The Dover Strait and the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north connect it to the Atlantic Ocean....
coast. Today this region is sometimes referred to as Great Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage, even though in most places the Frisian languages have been lost.

The people from North Germany and Denmark who settled in England

England

native_name =|conventional_long_name = England|common_name = England|image_flag = Flag of England.svg|image_coat = England COA.svg|symbol_type = Royal Coat of Arms...
from the 4th century onward, came from the same region and spoke the same language as the people who had settled in Fryslân. Therefore a close resemblance exists between Old Frisian and Old English

Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
. This similarity was reinforced in the late Middle Ages

Middle Ages

File:Karl 1 mit papst gelasius gregor1 sacramentar v karl d kahlen.jpgThe Middle Ages of European history are a period in history which lasted for roughly a millennium, commonly dated from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Early Modern Period in the 16th century, marked by the division of Western Christi...
by the Ingaevonic

Ingaevones

The Ingaevones or Ingvaeones , as described in Tacitus's Germania , written c. 98 CE, were a West Germanic cultural group living along the North Sea coast in the areas of Jutland, Holstein, Frisia and the Danish islands, where they had by the first century BCE become further differentiated to a foreigner's eye into the Frisia...
sound shift (Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law), which affected Frisian and English, but affected Old Saxon

Old Saxon

Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German , is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 9th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German....
only slightly, and not at all any of the other West Germanic varieties.

Phonology and grammar

When followed by some vowels the Germanic /k/ softened to a /t?/ sound; for example, the Frisian for cheese and church is tsiis and tsjerke, whereas in Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic languages spoken by over 22 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is very small. Most native...
it is kaas and kerk. One rhyme traditional to both England and Friesland demonstrates the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Bread, butter, and green cheese is good English and good Frisian," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages (Frisian: "Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.")

Old Frisian (c.1150-c.1550) retained grammatical cases

Declension

In linguistics, declension is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns and adjectives, indicating such features as grammatical number , grammatical case , and grammatical gender....
. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the twelfth or thirteenth, but most are from the 14th and 15th centuries. Generally, all these texts are restricted to legalistic writings. Although the earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century, there are a few examples of runic inscriptions from the region which are probably older and possibly in the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually do not amount to more than single- or few-word inscriptions.

Corpus

There are some early Frisian names preserved in Latin texts, and some runic (Futhorc) inscriptions, but the oldest surviving texts in Old Frisian date from the 13th century, in particular official and legal documents. They show a considerable degree of linguistic uniformity.

Westeremden yew-stick
Westeremden yew-stick

The Westeremden yew-stick is a yew-wood stick found in Westeremden B, in the Groningen province, in 1917, bearing a Old Frisian Futhorc inscription....
(ca. 750-900)
Fon Alra Fresena Fridome
Hunsigo MSS H1, H2: Ten Commandements, 17 petitiones
Londriucht
Thet Freske Riim
Skeltana Riucht law code