Mith frethe to wasane ‘to be in peace’: Remnants of the instrumental case in thirteenth and fourteenth century Old Frisian
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The case system in Old Frisian is commonly described as including four cases: nom., gen., dat., acc.Only a few lexical or onomastic relics are said to attest to the former existence of an instrumental and a locative case. Closer scrutiny, however, shows that a morphologically distinct instrumental and locative case were fairly consistently applied in some declensional classes, at least in some dialects of Old Frisian (c. 1250-1400). Traces are in particular found in texts from the Ems Frisian region, but are also attested in Codex Unia, reflecting Old West Frisian. The instrumental ending was PFri *-u < PIE *-oh1 throughout (nearly) all declensional classes, a uniformity typical for a case with a low frequency. The origin of the PFri locative ending *-i, restricted to the masculine a-stems, remains unclear. The reconstructed distribution of case endings found for the earliest stages of Old Frisian largely parallels the situation in nineteenth century Old Saxon.
Source: Filologia Germanica
DOI: 10.14672/fg.v9i.2578
Authors: Versloot, Arjen, Versloot, Arjen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W6904986399
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