Anglo-Frisian languages

The Anglo-Frisian languages is the group of West Germanic languages that includes English and Frisian.

The Anglo-Frisian languages are distinguished from other West Germanic languages by several sound changes: the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, Anglo-Frisian brightening, and palatalization of /k/:

• English cheese and West Frisian tsiis, but Dutch kaas, Low German Kees, and German Käse
• English church and West Frisian tsjerke, but Dutch kerk, Low German Kerk, Kark, and German Kirche

The early Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon speech communities lived close enough together to form a linguistic crossroads which is why they share some of the traits otherwise only typical of Anglo-Frisian languages.^[2] However, despite their common origins, Anglic and Frisian have become very divergent, largely due to the heavy Norse and French influences on English and similarly heavy Dutch and Low German influences on Frisian. The result is that Frisian now has a great deal in common with Dutch and the adjacent Low German dialects, bringing it into the West Germanic dialect continuum, whereas Anglic has stronger North Germanic and non-Germanic influences than the languages on the mainland.

Classification

The Anglo-Frisian family tree is:

• Anglo-Frisian
  • Anglic
    • English
    • Scots
    • Yola and Fingalian (both extinct)
  • Frisian
    • West Frisian
    • Saterland Frisian
    • North Frisian

Anglo-Frisian developments

The following is a summary of the major sound changes affecting vowels in chronological order:^[3]

1. Backing and nasalization of West Germanic ā̆ before a nasal consonant;
2. Loss of n before a spirant, resulting in lengthening and nasalization of preceding vowel;
3. The present and preterite plurals reduced to a single form;
4. A-fronting: WGmc ā̆ → ǣ, even in the diphthongs ai and au;
5. palatalization of Proto-Germanic *k to a coronal affricate before front vowels (but not phonemicization of palatals);
6. A-restoration: ǣ → ā under to the influence of neighboring consonants;
7. Second fronting: OE dialects (except West Saxon) and Frisian ǣ → ē;
8. A-restoration: a restored before a back vowel in the following syllable (later in the Southumbrian dialects); Frisian æu → au → Old Frisian ā/a;
9. OE breaking; in West Saxon palatal diphthongization follows;
10. i-mutation followed by syncope; Old Frisian breaking follows;
11. Phonemicization of palatals and assibilation, followed by second fronting in parts of West Mercia;
12. Smoothing and back mutation.

Comparison

These are the words for the numbers one to ten in the Anglo-Frisian languages:

• Ae /eː/, /jeː/ is the adjectival form used before nouns.^[4]

Comparison of Frisian with English, Dutch and German

Alternative grouping

Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that comprises Old Frisian, Old English^[5] and Old Saxon.^[6]

It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.^[7]

The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen (1942) by the German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984), as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams which had become popular following the work of the 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and which assumed the existence of an Anglo-Frisian group.^[8]

See also

• High German languages
• Low Franconian languages

Notes

1. ↑ Original meaning "relative" has become "brother or sister" in English.

References

1. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Anglo-Frisian". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 
2. ↑ The German linguist Friedrich Maurer rejected Anglo-Frisian as a historical subdivision of the Germanic languages. Instead, he proposed North Sea Germanic or Ingvaeonic, a common ancestor of Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon.
3. ↑ Robert D. Fulk, “The Chronology of Anglo-Frisian Sound Changes”, Approaches to Old Frisian Philology, eds., Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., Thomas S.B. Johnston, and Oebele Vries (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1998), 185.
4. ↑ Grant, William; Dixon, James Main (1921) Manual of Modern Scots. Cambridge, University Press. p.105
5. ↑ Also known as Anglo-Saxon.
6. ↑ Some include West Flemish. Cf. Bremmer (2009:22).
7. ↑ For a full discussion of the areal changes involved and their relative chronologies, see Voyles (1992).
8. ↑ "Friedrich Maurer (Lehrstuhl für Germanische Philologie - Linguistik)". Germanistik.uni-freiburg.de. Retrieved 2013-06-24. 

Further reading

• Friedrich Maurer (1942), Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, Strasbourg: Hünenburg.
• Wolfram Euler (2013), Das Westgermanische [subtitle missing] (West Germanic: from its Emergence in the 3rd up until its Dissolution in the 7th Century CE: Analyses and Reconstruction). 244 p., in German with English summary, Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd., London/Berlin, ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8.
• Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann (2014). The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, vol. II, 632p. ISBN 978-0199207848. Oxford.