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The question of the influence of Frisian on the diachronic development of Dutch has reportedly been considered by various scholars over the years. However, very little is available in English, or, outside the Netherlands, in any language at all. Part of my aim in this project is to provide a truly up-to-date and complete review of the literature and research, hunting up the sources of vague and teasing references I have come across in my research so far, as well as including newer works. In the meantime I have been able to find some articles focused specifically on this topic, and in addition some books on the Dutch language make passing references to Frisian influence. Brachin (1985:7), for instance, includes a paragraph listing some Frisian loanwords in Dutch. De Vries et al. (1993:21, 230) say that the number of Frisian loanwords in Dutch are "negligible, but more than many think"and otherwise doe not discuss the issue, but include a tantalizing diagram of the Germanic languages which links Old Dutch (in this diagram distinguished from Old Low Franconian and preceding Middle Dutch) with Old Low Franconian via a solid line and with Old Frisian via a dotted line. Donaldson (1983:128-129) briefly mentions some 'Ingwaeonisms' present in Dutch, but declines to speculate on their precise origin or method of transfer into Dutch. None of the work I have found in this area has been done with reference to theories of contact-induced language change; many, indeed, consider nothing but the lexicon, and may be considered themselves as extensions of the old idiotica (such as Winkler 1874) in their atomistic collections. The one exception I have found is Buccini (1992), who uses both Thomason and Kaufman's framework and Van Coetsem's in his challenge to Kaufman's classification of a Middle English pronoun as borrowed from 'Low Dutch'. Buccini describes the shifting population of the province of Holland (and also Zeeland and Flanders) as "Ingvaeonic", and passingly acknowledges the influence of a substratal language, but that is not the point of his article and is not further considered (Buccini 1992:11). A few others look beyond the lexicon to consider other linguistic subsystems. This was the case in 1942, when the newly-established Dialect Commission of the Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen made this question the focus of its second volume of published readings. All three articles in this volume consider a possible Frisian substrate in Noord-Holland. In the first article, Gosses (1942) comes to the conclusion that there is such a substrate, based on certain relic forms. Karsten (1942) focuses on the long stretch of coastline between Zwin, the harbor mouth by Bruges (Brugge), and Vlie, the passage between the islands of Terschelling and Vlieland. He, too, lists certain relics as evidence for his belief that such a substrate exists. In the final article, Heeroma (1942) takes issue with the terminology, claiming that Frisian was an East Ingvaeonic language, which thus never was a substrate in Noord-Holland, whose local language must be considered "a strongly Frankified West Ingvaeonic" (Heeroma 1942:28). The relic forms brought forth by these three scholars are various phonological characteristics, derivable from Frisian or Frankish sources; other linguistic subsystems are not discussed. In his standard work on the history of Dutch, Schönfeld (1959:xlii-xliii) spends about a page and a half in discussion of various Frisian elements in ABN, among them the possible loss of the ge- and be- prefixes, the almost voiceless pronunciation of word-initial v and z, various other phonological developments, and a few loanwords. Weijnen (1984) also discusses, with some fervor, a number of additional phonological and lexical items in Hollands which he attributes to a Frisian substrate. Van Haeringen (1923) presents an unusually broad consideration of this question. He points out that the expectations of finding traces of Frisian in the Frankish dialect of Hollands are justified by the historically documented long-term presence of Frisian speakers in the area, and goes on to delve into several aspects of the languages. He notes wistfully that it would be well worth while to gather all possible signs of Frisian influence in Hollands and then to research them thoroughly to determine their reliability and build up a true picture of the extent of such influence, noting that the development of Dutch dialectology by that time made such a project possible. As an overview and a first step, he presents a variety of such signs and discusses them, from isolated lexical items to morphological forms and some wider phonological points, in each case weighing the reliability of concluding Frisian influence. But he does not include any syntax, and neither does he attempt to tie any of the data to sociohistorical developments in Holland, concerning either the Hollands or the Frisian speakers. He is not alone in this. Even many of those who do consider the other linguistic subsystems do not look beyond the data, while an important aspect of the approach I intend to follow is the assertion that "the history of a language is a function of the history of its speakers" (Thomason and Kaufman 1988:4). I do not intend to pursue a primarily sociolinguistic focus, any more than Thomason and Kaufman do, but extralinguistic factors will be included and considered.
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