The Anglo-Saxon Language

[David]

 
When the Germanic settlers came to Britain the Saxons seemed to dominate the south and the Angles dominate the north. This would seem to suggest that the south of England started off speaking Western Germanic and the north of England speaking Northern Germanic, as the Angles came from Denmark. However right from the started it seemed that the whole of England spoke a single West Germanic language despite some dialectal differences. This language appears to have been closer to Old Frisian than Old Saxon.
 
I can’t find out anything about “Old Anglian” or “Old Jutish”, however I suspect that they were not North Germanic languages but West Germanic. Any North Germanic influence was probably reduced as they seem to have come to Britain via The Netherlands, not directly from Denmark. It is still a puzzle that Old English is closer to Old Frisian than Old Saxon. May I suggest that it might be that the Frisians had a greater presence in Kent which was the first dominant English kingdom and the one in which writing in the Roman alphabet spread.
 
I would be interested in hearing your ideas or any suggestions where we can find out about “Old Jutish” or “Old Anglian”.

[Eanflaed]

See thread in  OE Language "English is a Scandinavian Language" from Dec 2012. Looks like it might be helpful to you.

[Horsa]

There's Frisian dialects still spoken in Northern Germany and in modern Denmark - there are islands dotted from the netherlands Eastwards and northwards jutting up against modern Danish Jutland.

I get the impression that the languages spoken today in that part of the world, did not evolve there. There was a bit of shuffling about of peoples due to the incursion of the Huns which set the Vandals and the Goths a-roving and I believe that set off a chain of events iike a domino chain that resulted in the wandering of the Angles Jutes and Saxons who ended up on the shores of England and France. Basically, the Proto-Norse displaced the West Germanic speaking Jutes, Angles and Saxons Westward.

And I dimly remember reading (or reading dimly) that the Saxons were linguistically assimilated by speakers of other West German languages. I have a copy of the Old Saxon Heliand, and it's basically Old English with wonky spelling.

Do excuse the lack of links, authors, or indeed any real concrete details

[David]

Thank you for your comments Horsa. It appears that I was thinking along the right lines.
 
I was quite interested in Frisian when I was told that about 1200 AD Old Frisian was closer to Old English than most of the English dialects of the time. I thought that it would be good to see Modern Frisian. I was disappointed to find that the Frisian in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark look like three separate languages. However I have been told that the largest, the one in the Netherlands, did not split into very different dialects.
 
Maybe you could help with another of my conjectures. That is that the Franks in France switched from Old Frankish to Latin. However the Franks in the Netherlands did not make that change. Therefore Dutch and Flemish are the development of Old Frankish.

[peter horn]

An article relevant to tis subject is by Steve Pollington
in the Fellowship's New Handbook p27-30

[Phyllis]

Gird your loins for this - it's presumably aimed at Young People, but it does show Eddie Izzard attempting to speak OE to a Frisian man.

https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34

This is part of a series he did in 2003 for Discovery Channel about Old English, called "Mongrel Nation" .

(Don't shoot the messenger!)

[David]

An article relevant to tis subject is by Steve Pollington
in the Fellowship's New Handbook p27-30

This is an excellent article but I failed to see the relevance to this thread.


Can you give us the quotes that I missed on the languages of the Jutes, Angles, Friseans, Franks and the Dutch.


If you mixed it up with a different article can you tell us the correct article.

[peter horn]

An article relevant to tis subject is by Steve Pollington
in the Fellowship's New Handbook p27-30

This is an excellent article but I failed to see the relevance to this thread.


Can you give us the quotes that I missed on the languages of the Jutes, Angles, Friseans, Franks and the Dutch.


If you mixed it up with a different article can you tell us the correct article.

Just drawing attention to PIE
Languages could have some bearing on location of peoples
relevant as to whether a language evolved in a particular part of the world.
also location of tribes as they prior to moving towards Britain 5th cent
ie: Jutes-Angles-Saxons-Frisians
indicating that Angles did not come from present day Denmark, or indeed from the earlier
location of the Danes.