Re: CHAT: Frisian

On Thu, 05 Sep 2002 06:05, Pavel Iosad wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Just is anyone qualified enough to resolve the following difficulty?
>
> I have just bought a brochure, which claims to be a book, and is
> actually a 3000-thousand Russian-Frisian (Fering) lexicon, together with
> the essentials of the grammar. What it mentions and what puzzles me is
> the lack of a common Frisian language. What it says is that Old Frisian
> broke up into West Frisian (that being the Netherlands version), some 15
> North Frisian language_s_ (yes, plural), and by the way it says all the
> variants are standardized (I mean there is a standard for each
> language), and a number of East Frisian languages as well. While I have
> always been led to think that there is a common basically intelligible
> Frisian language, Netherlands Frisian being the accepted standard.
I've just begun to examine Frisian as the English Language's closest living
relative.  West Frisian can claim with such success to be a standardised
language these days, with texts published in it.  (some are quite
intelligible for L1 English speakers.)

East Frisian I don't know much about, only that there's an enclave of it
somewhere in Saxony inland south of Hamburg, and the rest of it is spread
over the West Coast and related islands of Denmark.  My guess is that the
Saxony enclave is unintelligible to the Frisian-speaking Danes - whether any
of them are mutually intelligible is not something I know about - as I
understand it, West Frisian is the only language/dialect in that group to
have a written language as such.

There are some Danes in this list - perhaps they could help us?

>
> I know the language vs dialect problem is a moot point, but can anyone
> say whether positing a number of Frisian languages is justified
> (socio)linguistically?
Well, the major sociolinguistic criteria in this case is having some form of
written language.  I would say that West Frisian is the defined language,
while the question of East Frisian is still up in the air.

Just my $00.02 worth!

Wesley Parish

>
> Thanks,
> Pavel
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."

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