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Frankish dialect

language

Learn about this topic in these articles:

Netherlandic language

  • Germanic languages in Europe
    In West Germanic languages: Dialects

    …have traditionally been called “Frankish”; the dialects of the northeastern part of the Netherlands (Overijssel, Drenthe, Groningen) have been called “Saxon” and show certain affinities with Low German dialects to the east. On the basis of other linguistic features, it is also possible to group together the dialects to…

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Romance languages

  • Romance languages
    In Romance languages: Vocabulary variations

    …taken some 700 words from Frankish (a Germanic language), not all of which have survived but some of which have passed via French into other Romance languages. Many of those were concerned with agriculture (jardin ‘garden,’ houe ‘hoe,’ blé ‘wheat,’ gerbe ‘sheaf,’ etc.) or with war (guerre ‘war,’ heaume ‘helmet’)…

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Also called:
Old Low German

Old Saxon language, earliest recorded form of Low German, spoken by the Saxon tribes between the Rhine and Elbe rivers and between the North Sea and the Harz Mountains from the 9th until the 12th century. A distinctive characteristic of Old Saxon, shared with Old Frisian and Old English, is its preservation of the voiceless stops (p, t, k) common to all Germanic languages; in High German these stops were affricates (pf, tz, kh) or long fricatives (ff, ss, hh). The Heliand, a life of Christ in alliterative verse written about 830, and a fragment of a translation of Genesis are the most significant Old Saxon literary works that have survived, although a number of minor fragments also exist. The modern Low German dialects developed from Old Saxon. See also German language.