Thread:User talk:CodeCat/frawjōn/reply (11)


 * "it doesn't really resemble Old English": even my quote didn't say it was Old English, did it? If you want to bring hwat/wat, I can bring hic/ic, the latter is a hypercorrection according to all interpretations I know (but I don't know many). Someone writing Latin (and using the continental alphabet), trying to learn Old Kentish is an alternative. Http://lyrics.wikia.com gives many examples of people trying to write down the lyrics of songs in foreign languages, many of them include a(n attempt at) translation.
 * "Wachtendonk Psalms": I only quoted en.wikipedia, but if you ask, I don't think "Old High German" did exist as a language either. Lack of High German consonant shift doesn't mean much, Attila did shift to Etzel in the Nibelungenlied. Some 40 years ago, I realized as a child that Limpurg (in e.g. Van Rechteren-Limpurg) is a bekakt pronunciation of Limburg. If kids speaking neighbouring dialects notice that, it doesn't distinguish languages, but sociolects.
 * "Leiden Willeram", writing 'z' for a /t/ at some places doesn't look Old Dutch to me.
 * "Rhinelandic Rhyming Bible", indeed, even today the local dialects have Brabantic and Low German features, which makes claiming a separate "Old Dutch" language a millennium ago somewhat farfetched.

I am implying that none of the Late Western Germanic dialects and jargots was Old Dutch (several of them had some of the features ascribed to Old Dutch, none of them had all) and that only after the rise of the Burgundians in the Southwestern Netherlands (and the subsequent Dutch Republic) the need to construct such a language arose.