USAGE: Dutch v or f (was: Grimm's Law)

John Cowan wrote:
(snip amusing story)
>But seriously, if this is a borrowing, where is it a borrowing from?
>Not from English, at any rate.

(JC's question related to Du. fokken.  I don't know that it's necessarily a
borrowing. )

The original question related to the f/v variation in German spelling (where
neither one seems specifically to mark loanwords, though a large majority of
v-listings are verbs with ver- or vor-) vs. the similar variation in Dutch,
where "f" _does_ seem to predominate in loans-- except some few that don't
_obviously_ seem to be loans.  I was hoping some of our Dutch correspondents
would enlighten us.

(I know little about developments from common Gmc. > modern German, but note
that both Vater and Fisch etc. had "f-" in Gothic (of course it didn't have
a letter "v"), both < IE *p)-- so somewhere along the way, German spelling
seems to have got a bit mixed up......There are obvious loans in both "f"
and "v" listings in my Germ. dictionary; they tend to follow ""f ~ v" in the
source language)

Uncertain (native? loans? dialect forms?) Dutch words with initial "f":

falen 'to fail' (possibly French?, cf. Sp. fallecer?); fel 'fierce' (cf.
Engl.
fell-- 'one fell swoop'?), fladderen 'to flutter', flauw 'insipid, silly,
faint' (Fr. again? cf. Span. flaco?), fokken 'to breed (animals)', fuif
'spree', fuiven 'to revel', fut 'spirit, pep'-- this last looks like it
wants to be a Kash word....adds to dictionary  ;-)

I did run to the Kash dictionary, and alas, _fut_ 'spirit, pep' can't join
the throng-- it's much too close to variant/slang forms that mean 'bowel
movement' or coarser versions thereof.....

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