1. Primitive Affinity between the Classical and the Low German Languages

1872 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Neaves
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Low German ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
The Family ◽  
German Dialects ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Comparative Philology

In this paper the author adverted to the limited attention that was paid in this country to comparative philology, and noticed the principles it had developed and the progress it had made elsewhere of late years.In illustration of the results thus attained in the Aryan or Indo-Germanic languages, he took as familiar examples the affinities that could be traced between the Latin and the Old English tongues, viewing the Latin as a type of the earlier branches of the family, including the Greek and Indian; and the English as a type of a later branch, consisting chiefly of the Low German dialects. The affinities referred to were not those which connected Latin with English through the romance languages, but those which subsisted between Latin and vernacular English, and which must have arisen from a prehistoric identity or connection.

Old Frisian

Diachronica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Laura Catharine Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic languages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle English, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebunga (Boutkan & Siebunga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are available as text editions”1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). This has left a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Frisian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps.

Early Changes of Dental Fricatives: English and Frisian Compared

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 243-267
Author(s):  
Stephen Laker
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
The Middle Ages

Dental fricatives [θ ð] develop along similar lines in English and Frisian throughout most of the Middle Ages. The consonants were retained in about equal measure, but alterations occurred when next to other consonants. A way of explaining the changes in both languages is by invoking complexity of articulation, a notion that finds empirical support. The parallel developments of English and Frisian undermine the idea that Old English evolved differently from other Old Germanic languages during its earliest stages. However, from the late fourteenth century, Frisian took on a different trajectory of change due to new social circumstances connected with increased language contact and bilingualism, especially with Dutch and Low German.

Conceptual metaphors as a tool for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine De Knop ◽  
Julien Perrez
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Semantic Networks ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Conceptual Metaphors ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Germanic Languages

The article deals with the typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic languages German and Dutch for the linguistic expressions of posture and location. It describes how these typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German and Dutch. The main difference between both types of languages is that posture and location tend to be encoded by posture verbs in Germanic languages and by very general verbs in Romance languages (Talmy 2000). After a detailed description of the semantic networks of the German and Dutch posture verbs, the paper takes a critical look at how these expressions are dealt with in teaching manuals. It further presents strategies for the efficient teaching of posture verbs to foreign language learners. These strategies are among others awareness-raising exercises about the compulsory use of posture verbs in Germanic languages and the description of conceptual metaphors in different languages. These pedagogical avenues for the efficient teaching of the Dutch and German posture verbs constitute a first step towards the elaboration of an experimental set-up aiming at verifying them.

Morphologie und Semantik der n-Erweiterung bei Muttern und Vatern im Deutschen

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-79
Author(s):  
Alexander Werth
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Low German ◽  
German Dialects ◽  
Semantic Concepts ◽  
Formation Pattern ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Comparative Constructions

Abstract: This paper deals with German kinship terms ending with the form n (Muttern, Vatern). Firstly, data from newspapers are presented that show that especially Muttern denotes very special meanings that can only be derived to a limited extent from the lexical base: a) Muttern referring to a home where mother cares for you, b) Muttern standing for overprotection, and c) Muttern representing a special food style (often embedded in prepositional phrases and/or comparative constructions like wie bei or wie von Muttern). Secondly, it is argued that the addition of n to kinship terms is not a word-formation pattern, but that these word forms are instead lexicalized and idiomatized in contemporary German. Hence, a diachronic scenario is applied to account for the data. It is argued in the present paper that the n-forms have been borrowed from Low German dialects, especially from constructional idioms of the type ‘X-wie bei Muttern’ and that forms were enriched by semantic concepts associated with the dialect.

Null Subjects in Old English

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
English I

I review the proposal made by Sigurðsson (2011) that null arguments follow from third-factor principles, as in Chomsky 2005 . A number of issues remain unclear: for instance, the kind of topic that licenses null arguments in Modern Germanic, including Modern English. I argue that Old English is pro drop and add to the discussion Frascarelli (2007) started as to which topic licenses a null subject. I agree with Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) that the licensing topic in Modern Germanic and Old English is an aboutness-shift topic. I also argue that verb movement to C is necessary to license the empty argument in the modern Germanic languages (including Modern English), but not in Old English, since agreement is still responsible for licensing in that language, as in Italian.

Blame the Barbarians

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-82
Author(s):  
Arika Okrent ◽  
Sean O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Old English ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Over Time

This chapter tells the story of how English got to be the weird way it is, which begins with the Germanic languages and the barbarians who spoke them. During the 5th century, an assortment of them poured across the North Sea, from what is today Denmark, the Netherlands, and Northern Germany, and conquered most of England. After about a century of the Germanic tribes taking over and settling in, the Romans returned. This time it was not soldiers but missionaries who arrived. The monks who came to convert the island to Christianity brought their Latin language with them, and they also brought the Latin alphabet. They set about translating religious texts into the language of the people they encountered, a language that by this time had coalesced into something that was Old English. However, there is another group of barbarians to blame: the Vikings. Their language was similar enough to Old English that they could communicate with the Anglo-Saxons without too much difficulty, and over time their own way of speaking mixed into the surrounding language, leaving vocabulary and expressions behind that do not quite fit the rest of the pattern at the old Germanic layer.

scholarly journals Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Farasyn ◽  
Anne Breitbarth
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
North West ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

AbstractIn spite of growing interest in recent years, the syntax of Middle Low German (MLG) remains an extremely underresearched area. In light of recent research showing early North West Germanic languages to be partial null subject languages (Axel 2005; Walkden 2014; Kinn 2016; Volodina/Weiß 2016), the question arises where MLG is positioned in this respect. The present article presents novel data showing that MLG had referential null subjects (RNS) and can be classified as a partial null subject language. Based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of their syntactic distribution, we argue that two types of RNS must be distinguished in MLG, null topics in SpecCP and null clitics on C.

New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-277
Author(s):  
Philip Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract It is well known that the set of kinship terms in Middle English showed considerable influence from French. In the case of aunt and uncle, this accompanied major restructuring of the system of kinship terms, as the Old English set of four distinct terms for paternal and maternal uncles and aunts were replaced by just two terms for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, regardless of whether paternal or maternal. In comparison, the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ have attracted little attention, as their story has appeared simpler: Old English had words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, irrespective of whether paternal or maternal, and so did Middle English. The terms are also similar in structure, with native terms in which words for ‘father’ or ‘mother’ are the head and eald ‘old’ is the modifier (whether in a compound or a phrasal structure) being replaced by borrowed terms (grandsire, granddame) or hybrid terms (grandfather, grandmother) in which French grand ‘big’ is the modifier. This paper shows that behind this apparently simple story there lurk some significant complications which point to considerable disruption and instability in the terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ in both Middle English and French (with interesting and perhaps significant parallels also in other West Germanic languages). Consideration of these complications also casts new light on early lexical borrowing into Middle English from Anglo-Norman.

Early Latin loan-words in Old English

1993 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Wollman
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Complete List ◽  
The West ◽  
Loan Words ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
Germanic Languages

It is a well-known fact that Old English is rich in Latin loan-words. Although the precise number is not yet known, it is a fairly safe assumption that there are at least 600 to 700 loan-words in Old English. This compares with 800 Latin loan-words borrowed in different periods in the Brittonic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), and at least 500 early Latin loan-words common to the West Germanic languages. These rather vague overall numbers do not lend themselves, however, to a serious analysis of Latin influence on the Germanic and Celtic languages, because they include different periods of borrowing which are not really comparable to each other. The basis of these estimates, moreover, is often not stated very clearly. Although the establishment of a complete list of Latin loan-words in the various Germanic languages is a desideratum, it can only be achieved in a later stage of our studies.

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