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Between Saxon, Franconian, and Danish: the Obstruents of Frisian

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Between Saxon, Franconian, and Danish: the Obstruents of Frisian Between Saxon, Franconian, and Danish: the Obstruents of Frisian Kurt Goblirsch 1. INTRODUCTION The Frisian language area, along the North Sea coast of the Netherlands and Germany, is rather small and lies in the middle of Germanic speaking territory. Due to its location, it has had contacts with other languages on all sides. Historically, Old Frisian belonged to the North Sea Germanic or Ing- væonic branch of Germanic, along with Old English and Old Saxon. The main features unifying this subgroup included the loss of nasals before fricatives, the merger of accusative and dative personal pronouns of the first and second persons, and the unified verb plural. More commonalities can be found if we restrict ourselves to the minor texts of Old Saxon, which show less High German influence than the Heliand. Closer yet was the relationship between Old Frisian and Old English. The Anglo-Frisian subgroup was tied together mainly by common vocalic innovations: the fronting of Gmc a > æ, fronting of West Gmc â > æ2, the retraction and rounding of a/â before nasals, the monophthongization of the Gmc ai > â, and possibly the development of Gmc au > ça.1 Regarding the consonants, Laker also includes palatalization of velars as a common feature, though it is not entirely agreed whether it arose in a time of unity or was the result of parallel development.2 Yet Frisian’s link to English has been fading since the Middle Ages. The modern dialects, consisting of West Frisian in the northern Nether- lands, East Frisian in northwestern Lower Saxony, and North Frisian on the coast and islands of Schleswig-Holstein have been influenced to a great ex- tent by their larger neighbours, which have had official language status: Dutch, Low German (later High German), and Danish. The influence of Dutch and German is well known, since Frisian territory is currently lo- cated in the Netherlands and Germany. Yet North Frisia was formerly more subject to Danish influence, since it was part of the Danish Duchy of Sles- vig until 1864. The result of these external influences has not only been the 1 Goblirsch, ‘Germanic ai and au in Anglo-Frisian’, 17–23. For a recent discussion of Anglo-Frisian parallels, see Bremmer, Introduction to Old Frisian, 125–8. 2 Laker, ‘Palatalization of Velars’, 173–4. 96 Goblirsch shrinking of Frisian territory on all fronts, but also the adoption of features from the neighbouring languages. The following contribution to this volume will analyze the typology of Frisian obstruents from a historical perspective, showing the original affili- ation with the North Sea Germanic group, especially with Old English, and the transition of the obstruent system to a more Dutch, i.e., Low Francon- ian, type in the west, to a more Low Saxon type in the east, and to a more Danish type in the northeast. It will be seen that in the area of consonan- tism, the Anglo-Frisian features have been fading, but that traces are still attested in the modern era. 2. THE SECOND CONSONANT SHIFT Originally, the language spoken by the Frisians must have had an obstruent system much like the rest of Northwest Germanic (NWGmc). The indi- vidual North and West Germanic languages were affected by what may be understood as different variants of the Second Consonant Shift. The most famous is, of course, the High German Shift, but other variants of this shift took place in the remaining Old Germanic languages as well. The lesser- known variants are the Icelandic Shift, the Danish Shift, and the Partial Shift in Swedish, Norwegian, English, and Low German.3 All of these variants of the Second Shift, like the First Consonant Shift, share the same mechanism and the same initial stage, namely the replacement of dis- tinctive voice by aspiration, as originally posited by Fourquet and Kury- ³owicz.4 The different versions of the Second Shift followed the same progression in the development of stops in the direction of fricatives, i.e., p, t, k > ph, t h, k h > pf, tx, kx > f(f), s(s), x(x), but to differing degrees and with differing positional outcomes. 2.1. The Northwest Germanic obstruent system Before turning to the variants of the Second Consonant Shift that have af- fected Frisian, it will be necessary to establish the NWGmc obstruent system. It is posited that the original NWGmc system is much like that of Modern Standard Dutch.5 Ironically, as we will see below, this is the type of system, which is being re-imposed on West Frisian through Dutch in- fluence. In the majority of Dutch, there has been no Second Consonant Shift at all. The NWGmc obstruent system has been well established,6 even 3 Cf. Goblirsch, Lautverschiebungen in den germanischen Sprachen, 102–36. 4 Fourquet, Les mutations consonantiques du germanique, 11–15; Kury³owicz, ‘Les sens des mutations consonantiques’, 80–1. 5 Goblirsch, ‘The Voicing of Fricatives in West Germanic and the Partial Consonant Shift’, 129; Goblirsch, ‘Aspiration und Lautverschiebung’. 6 Goblirsch, ‘The Correlation of Voice in Germanic’, 131–4; Goblirsch, Laut- verschiebungen, 80–101, and the literature cited there..
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