English's link to Frisian

The Frisian languages are the closest living languages to English, and they all make up the Anglo-Frisian sub-family of languages.

One sees so many words that exist in English, or else existed in Old English, but don't have cognates anywhere else but in Frisian. I will include the numerals in English, Old English, and several Frisian dialects below:

The Old English Wordhoard (The Old English Vocabulary)

One of the most frustrating things about comparing Germanic vocabulary between various languages and English is just how much Old English was jettisoned over time. Also, many words that did survive from Old English had one meaning then, but came to mean something else entirely, and now no longer match their foreign cognates semantically. Had English developed in a straight line, the modern language would have so much more lexical similarity to all of the other modern Germanic languages.

Some of the words that came from French and have been fully adopted into English have torn this lexical similarity to shreds. I will include several examples below:

Cream
Old English: rēam
Dutch: room
German: Rahm
Norwegian: rømme
Icelandic: rjómi

Eagle
Old English: earn
Danish: ørn
Swedish: örn
Icelandic: örn

Poor
Old English: earm
Dutch: arm
German: arm
Swedish: arm

Pour
Old English: scencan
Dutch: schenken
German: schenken
Danish: skænke
Swedish: skänka
Norwegian: skjenke

Revenge
Old English: wracu
Dutch: wraak
German: Rache

Salmon
Old English: leax
German: Lachs
Danish: laks
Swedish: lax
Norwegian: laks
Icelandic: lax

Stomach
Old English: maga
Dutch: maag
German: Magen
Danish: mave
Swedish: mage
Norwgian: mage
Icelandic: maga

Voice
Old English: stefn
Dutch: stem
German: Stimme
Danish: stemme
Swedish: stämma
Norwegian: stemme

Worken mid a speech (Working with a language)

When I begin to document the cognates within a language, I must first find a reference book. I do not trust the sources on just any website, and Google Translate, though a good tool, is limited in many ways.

Often, these wordbooks (dictionaries) must be shipped from overseas and can be quite difficult to find due to their obscurity. Another issue that results from the books' obscurity is that they are sometimes not in English. For instance, my Elfdalian wordbook is exclusively in Swedish, and many of the Frisian and Low German wordbooks are only published in German.

The ideal would be that all of these wordbooks would be in English, but I know enough of the Germanic wordhoard (vocabulary) to understand them.

At that point, it's just a matter of combing through the dictionary looking for terms that have already been included in the database. What always happens though is that I find even more terms that I haven't yet included. This forces me to continually revisit languages to add more terms to the database.

It's not always that easy though. There was a specific wordbook that was a bummer to scour through. My North Frisian (Föhr-Amrum) wordbook has only one section, which lists the words as North Frisian to German and not the other way around. My unfamiliarity with the language meant that I had to go through the wordbook cover to cover in order to make sure that I caught every cognate possible.

Inleading (Introduction)

For my first post, I'd like to introduce what my work is and where I'd like it to go.

I am compiling a comprehensive list of Germanic vocabulary that have cognates (near-cognates and related words) in English. The most important part is the inclusion of the cognates in as many Germanic languages as possible. At the moment, the database includes 19 modern languages/dialects and 6 archaic ones. These include:

Frisian: West Frisian, East Frisian, North Frisian (Hallig, Föhr-Amrum & Söl'ring dialects)

Low German: Münsterländer, Pomeranian & Mennonite

Low Franconian: Dutch & Afrikaans

High German: Standard & Pennsylvania German

Continental Scandinavian: Elfdalian, Danish, Swedish & Norwegian (Bokmål & Nynorsk)

Insular Scandinavian: Faroese & Icelandic

Archaic: Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse & Gothic

The archaic dialects are less complete, though Old English, Old Norse & Gothic are almost so.

I'm also hoping to acquire additional sources to further fulfill the database. At the moment, I'd like to add Flemish, Yiddish (transliterated into Latin characters), and Swiss German. I am debating whether to include Scots or (even less likely) Yola.

In the next post, I will go into the actual process of working with a particular language.