Re: CHAT: Frisian

Wesley PArish wrote:
>On Thu, 05 Sep 2002 07:25, Roberto Suarez Soto wrote:
> > On Sep/04/2002, Pavel Iosad wrote:
> > > actually a 3000-thousand Russian-Frisian (Fering) lexicon, together
>with
> >
> >         Sorry to play the fool, but ... what language is frisian? I've
> > heard of it sometimes, but it seemed to me like a dead language, like
> > latin :-m Am I very wrong?
>
>Frisian is the Germanic language closest to English; it is spoken in the
>north of the Netherlands, in an enclave in Saxony south of Hamburg and on
>the
>South-West coast and islands of Denmark.  (The Frisians were the Angles and
>Saxones who missed the boat and decided not to swim. The Jutes/Geatas were
>from South Sweden - read all about it in Beowulf!  ;)
>
The Jutes were from Jutland, rather. Whether the the Geatas of Beowulf fame
were identical to the Jutes, to the Götar (there does not appear to be an
accepted English form of this word - the second letter is o-umlaut, and the
sg is "Göte", which's also a Swedish masc name) of southern Sweden, or
somebody elses is under debate. The Geatas=Jutes identification seems to be
the most popular, at least the works I've seen. I'm sure somebody somewhere
is writing thickish books proving that the Geatas actually were the Gutar
(people of Gotland).

And let's not forget throwning the Goths into the mix. I'm sort of liking
the theory that all these names go back to an old Germanic word for "man".

                                                Andreas

PS And sorry to Wesley to whom I accidently sent a separate copy of this
mail. You appear to have the some trouble with your mailer settings as Irina
has/had.

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