In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Advances in Old Frisian Philology
  • Kurt Goblirsch
Advances in Old Frisian Philology (Amsterdamer Beiträge Zur älteren Germanistik 64 / Estrikken 80). Edited by Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., Stephen Laker, and Oebele Vries. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Pp. xvi + 494. 7 illustrations. $140.

The present volume is the third collection of articles on various aspects of Old Frisian, the first two volumes, Aspects of Old Frisian Philology (ABäG, 31–32 / Estrikken, 69, 2000) and Approaches to Old Frisian Philology (ABäG, 49 / Estrikken, 69, 1998) having gone before. The editors have solicited nineteen useful articles on Old Frisian language, literature, and (cultural) history. Some of the articles are on exclusively Frisian topics, while others have comparative Germanic implications. The book will therefore be of interest not only to specialists in Frisian but also those in English and comparative Germanic studies. The articles are distributed in the various subfields of Frisian philology: language variation and dialects, phonology, vocabulary, and cultural history, especially laws. The collection is prefaced by "Old Frisian Philology: Along the Road" (pp. ix-xvi), a review by Rolf Bremmer of significant works on Old Frisian appearing since 1998, when he published a similar study in the second volume of the series. This review will discuss selected articles of more general interest in some detail.

Two of the chapters deal with dialect and language mixture in Old Frisian manuscripts. In "Language Admixture in the Old West Frisian Basle Wedding Speeches?" (pp. 1–27), Alderik Blom follows Campbell in positing that admixture is normal in written Frisian of the fifteenth century. The texts in question are to be found in Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F. VII. 12, a manuscript compiled around 1500. Blom hypothesizes that the first two of the three speeches were copied from sources that followed Middle Low German and/or Middle Dutch originals, a process which resulted in non-Frisian forms entering the texts. The third speech, on the other hand, was possibly composed for a particular occasion, using the first two as a model, by the likely scribe of the manuscript, Bernhard of Rordahuisum (modern Reduzum). Blom provides a list of deviant (apparently non-Frisian) forms in the three texts, many with unexpected vowel spellings, such as dat 'that' for OFris. thet or twf 'two' for OFris. twb, while a few deviations may be considered morphological or lexical, such as infinitives in –n (gheven vs. OFris. giva) or gheen 'nobody' for OFris. nen. Following the work of Bremmer on the Middle Low German Life of St. Hubert (also found in the Basel manuscript) and of Campbell on Thet Freske Riim, Blom concludes that use of Middle Dutch and Middle Low German spelling conventions was typical of Frisian texts in the eastern Netherlands. Middle Dutch and Middle Low German are so closely related that it is sometimes difficult to tell which language a given spelling came from. In some cases, it is further not clear whether we are dealing with language influence or purely Frisian spelling variants.

Rolf Bremmer's "Language and Contents of the Old Frisian Manuscripts from Rüstringen (c. 1300): 'A Veritable Mixtum Compositum'" (pp. 29–64) points to the conclusion that these manuscripts do not reflect an especially archaic phonological system, as has been maintained by Buma and Boutkan. For example, old h has generally been lost in the initial cluster hr- in the spelling of the place of provenance: the spelling Hriostring- appears only in a few instances. "Löfstedt's [End Page 265] Law," the lowering in open syllables of i to e and u to o, not to be confused with other West Germanic breakings, is another innovation in the dialect. Rüstringen, the most important center of writing in the Weser East Frisian area, produced four extant manuscripts. The first two are of considerable length and are collections of smaller texts, which, as Bremmer points out, are better examined individually. An analysis of the exceptional forms in the texts, that is, those which do not conform to what is considered Weser Frisian, results in Bremmer's conclusion that these forms are derived from non-Riustringen exemplars, most notably those written in Ems East Frisian. A prominent indicator of Ems...

pdf

Share