Elp me out

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It would by no means be strange or unprecedented - Linguistically our current Frisians are clearly close from earelist days to Old English - where despite "Anglo-Saxon" the language is not as close to Old Saxon as to the oldest Frisian [though the Frisian docs do not go back so far as I would like.

If a population moves into the territory, they can easily take their name from the territory, rather than giving it. Compare Zambia, where the Lozi took on the name of the locals instead of imposing the Sotho of their origins.

My friend, who is also my daughter's Godfather, told how there had been a foreign exchange student from Frisia when he was in high school. He said this kid could speak in Frisian, and still could make himself understood well enough.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

i believe it - the Frisians are proud of it, being little and marginalized but brother to something as big as English. It makes a little difference which - West Frisian [northern Netherlands] and North Frisian [Denmark and the islands through Helgoland] are pretty different, though some of that is orthography, I think. East Frisian of course is essentially dead, replaced by Plattdeutsch [I will not guarantee NO East Frisian survives, a Sprachinsel can surprise you].

I may be completely wrong, but I think Wikipedia said East Frisian is still in existence as a language. I really should have checked it out first before posting.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saterland_Frisian_language

This is why I am careful about being dogmatic on language death. Frisian is not a mainline field for me, and the last several authorities talking about it claime East Frisian dead.

I note the article is talking "Frisian substrate" - so the querstion comes, is this Frisian with big doses of Plattdeutsch influence, or a dialect f Platt with a lot of Frisian words and an accent?

The little sample in the text is to small for judgement. I may try to find a larger sample.

Key telltales are the form of the infinitive, maintenance of the gerund dative, and some phonological traits. If I find anything I will report.

Okay - I found this:

http://seelter.110mb.com/NSW_Intro.pdf

In which we see, though phonology is not really helpful and there is a lot of assimilation to Platt, the distinctive form of the Fem def Art and the maintenance of the twin infinitive forms [extinct in West Germanic except in Frisian] says to me, likely we can count this as Frisian still.

Intriguing.

So - in Ostfriesland proper it is gone, but this colony remains.

East Friesland (Ostrafriesland) is just a string of little islands off the German coast, and on language maps its just colored the same as regular old German. West Friesland is a chunk of land and a string of little island in the Northwest corner of the Netherlands (quite close to England) and has its own language seperate from Dutch that is remarkably like Old English. It even has traits of the early modern english of shakespeare and the King James Bible like sticking the "est" and "th" ending on verbs- as in "methinks the the lady doth protest too much".

The Friesians doublless contributed the Germanic invasion of Britian atleast as much as did the Angles and Saxons.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 22 Nov 2010, 7:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Don't forget the Jutes.

Kraichgauer, my Ocford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe fails to mention the Elpings [let's pretend they were Germanic] by name, but I did find mention of longhouses in the right position.

Gee, all this is fascinating. It's really too bad that the peoples involved simply couldn't stop slaughtering each other, and continued to do so even with modern weapons (such things as machine guns, tanks, etc), resulting in such severe depopulation of Europe by the 1950s that European cultures were unable to pull out of the demographic tailspin, and their reproduction rates became so low that the death of their cultures became guaranteed.

It really matters little who would have taken over, it just happened to be Muslims from Arabia and North Africa. It's to the point now that Canada and the US are more European, genetically, than Europe. Quebec is far more French than France itself, which is on track to become an Islamic nation populated by Arabs and Africans within 50 years. Australia and NZ are far more English than England, which will likely be a Muslim nation of peoples from former English colonies at around the same time that France stops being in any way French. There are parts of the Northeast US that are more Italian, genetically and culturally, than much of Italy, although Italy was not as badly affected by the wars as France and Germany.

North America will probably be a Spanish speaking neo-Central American culture within the next century or two. That will likely make Albuquerque more Spanish than Spain, which has reproduction rates so low that it too is on the fast track towards Islamization. In 200 years English or a variant thereof will be all but dead outside of Australasia. French will likely be a dead language too, as will German and several other Germanic-Scandinavian languages. The main languages to survive will be Spanish, Arabic, and likely Canton Chinese, after southern China races ahead of the north, where Mandarin comes from. Spanish will be spoken in the Americas, Arabic in Europe and the Middle East, and Cantonese in eastern Asia.

I am not sure I catch the point?

Yes, humans from well before the first strokes of history have been muscling in on one another's territoty, pushing the aborigines [by now usually the who knows how manyeth replacement "aboriginals"] out or sbjugating then or occasionally annihilating.

And yes, it is not going to stop while this planet remains a human environment.

Is any of this news? Have you a suggestion as to how to make homo sapiens less human?

Look up Elp culture on Wikipedia.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Human populations who remain static become stagnant, and die. America's greatness is based on that we are a melting pot. The populations of historic Europe - Germans, English, Italians, etc., are only the product of earlier mixing of populations.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

More like a stew pot. There are lumps in the mix that just won't dissolve.

ruveyn

But doesn't that just make the stew tastier?

-bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer