# About Old Saxon, Old Jutish, Old Angles dialects



## Orione60

Hi, I want to put you a couple of questions.

I'm interested in Old Saxon, Old Jutish and Old Angles dialects and I referred to a post in 2008 about German-Danish dialect continuum. In that post berndf talked about Old Saxon, Old Jutish and Old Angels as different
dialects, o maybe, as diatopic varieties of Old Saxon. Elsewhere, on the WEB I found different statements, usually Jutish and Angles spoke Old Saxon (none allusion to dialects, or, at least, diatopic variety of old Saxon). In that post berndf said Angles language mixed with that of their Saxon neighbours in the south (Anglo-Saxon ), while Saxon dialects from the other side of the
Elbe River stayed clear of Anglian and Jutish influence. 

My questions are:

1) Why we are able to refer to Old Saxon, Old Jutish and Old Angles as different dialects/diatopic varieties of old Saxon? How much we can be sure of this statement?

2) Why it's possible to assert that Anglo-Saxon rised north of the Elbe River and, later, was borne to Britain? And, if so, was there differences between the original Anglo-Saxon and OE dialects (Mercian, Northumbrian,
Kentish and West Saxon), or Anglo-Saxon coincided strictly with one of these dialects?

Thanks for your answers.

Antony


----------



## berndf

Evidence we have is of course rather indirect. To my knowledge, continental Anglian/Anglo-Saxon dialects are not recoded. It is assumed that the Anglian dialect is closely related to Frisian. E.g. the palatalization of /c/ as in _kerke>church_ (the initial "k" only) exist in Frisian, too. This feature exists in all (or almost all?) Old English dialects but is not found in continental Old Saxon of which we have evidence. This suggests that English Saxon and Anglian dialects mixed to a certain degree while continental Old Saxon stayed clear of this influence.


----------



## Orione60

May you tell me something about Old Jutish too?
Have we got any evidences of it?


----------



## berndf

No, I am sorry, I know next to nothing about it. Only what you can read in any textbook, i.e. that the the Jutes settled in the SE of England and that the Kentish dialect of Old English is supposed to be derived from it and that modern Danish is derived from Old Norse and not from Old Jutish.


----------



## Orione60

You talked about the palatalization of /c/ as an Anglian feature, but could itbe not an Anglian but a Frisian input?


----------



## berndf

How should this have happened?


----------



## Orione60

Maybe I'm wrong, I belived Frisians was together Angels, Saxon and Jutes during migrations in Britain.


----------



## berndf

Orione60 said:


> Maybe I'm wrong, I belived Frisians was together Angels, Saxon and Jutes during migrations in Britain.


I don't think we have direct evidence for that, At least I am not aware of any.

The main source describing the the Anglo-Saxon settlement in England in this short chapter from Bede's _Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_, book I, chapter 15.
Latin original:





> Aduenerant autem de tribus Germaniae populis fortioribus, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Iutis. De Iutarum origine sunt Cantuarii et Uictuarii, hoc est ea gens, quae Uectam tenet insulam, et ea, quae usque hodie in prouincia Occidentalium Saxonum Iutarum natio nominatur, posita contra ipsam insulam Uectam. De Saxonibus, id est ea regione, quae nunc Antiquorum Saxonum cognominatur, uenere Orientales Saxones, Meridiani Saxones, Occidui Saxones. Porro de Anglis, hoc est de illa patria, quae Angulus dicitur, et ab eo tempore usque hodie manere desertus inter prouincias Iutarum et Saxonum perhibetur, Orientales Angli, Mediterranei Angli, Merci, tota Nordanhymbrorum progenies, id est illarum gentium, quae ad Boream Humbri fluminis inhabitant, ceterique Anglorum populi sunt orti.


English translation:





> Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany ­ Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.


----------



## Orione60

About Frisians presence in Britain, I found something in Procopius of Caesarea's account: "The island of Brittia is inhabited by three very populous nations each having a king over it and the names of these nations are _Angiloi_, _Frissones_ and those of one name with the island _Brittones_."  In The Genesis of the Old English Dialects: A New Hypothesis -David DeCamp -Language - Vol. 34, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1958), pp. 232-244 (you may find something on the web), you can read: "Though no one now doubs that there were Frisians, among others, in Kent....(omissis)...". This article try to prove that Kentish dialect of OE and in certain part all OE dialects were influenced by Frisians language.


----------



## Outsider

Procopius seems like a questionable source. He would not have had first-hand knowledge of Britain, and it's likely that the information about Britain that reached the Byzantines in his day was spotty and distorted...


----------



## berndf

Orione60 said:


> In The Genesis of the Old English Dialects: A New Hypothesis -David DeCamp -Language - Vol. 34, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1958), pp. 232-244...


Resting solely on /a/>/e/, I find the the argument of the paper not entirely compelling. But there is much to be said in favour of the idea of Old English having remained connected to the West-Germanic dialect continuum for several centuries after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Otherwise it would e.g. be difficult to understand why English and German underwent the loss of full vowels in unstessed end-syllables (e.g. infinitive suffix_ -an_ > _-en_) more or less at the same time.


----------



## Yondlivend

I read a paper some time ago entitled _The Origin of the Old English Dialects_.  The author states in the beginning:


> 1. It has been argued that the Old English dialects either reflect old tribal divisions or developed after the Anglo-Saxon emigration.  I think that neither view is correct.  In the following I intend to show that the early divergences between West Saxon and Kentish on the one hand and Anglian (Mercian and Northumbrian) on the other are the result of a chronological difference between two waves of migration from the same dialectal area.


The source is here.

I'm not sure if that will help any, but as I came across this thread I figured that I would provide what I have.


Orione60 said:


> Whyis it possible to assert that Anglo-Saxon rose north of the Elbe River and, later, was borne to Britain?  And, if so, were there differences between the original Anglo-Saxon and OE Dialects (Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon) or did Anglo-Saxon coincide strictly with one of these dialects?


I'm only going to answer the second question here as I don't know enough about the topic to answer the first.  West Saxon was established as the standard dialect of writing in Old English, so it's the dialect we know most about.  From what I've seen there are some records of dialectal differences although I believe this becomes more obvious in the Middle English period, before a new standard was established.

Some differences between the OE dialects:


berndf said:


> It is assumed that the Anglian dialect is closely related to Frisian. E.g. the palatalization of /c/ as in _kerke>church_ (the initial "k" only) exist in Frisian, too. This feature exists in all (or almost all?) Old English dialects but is not found in continental Old Saxon of which we have evidence.


Northumbrian is the only dialect that comes to mind that did not exhibit palatalization (at least not of c), which some believe is due to the influence of Old Norse on it.  Northumbrian also exhibits loss of n in the (bare) infinitive, the reasons for which I do not know, but it may also be related to Old Norse as that language lost the n in the infinitive.

Anglian is said to contrast with West Saxon in the development of the vowel /æ/ before r and other letters, where it was said to break into a diphthong in West Saxon while it was changed to a back vowel in Anglian.  What I find strange about this change is that in West Saxon texts there are words such as ærn, where one can clearly see the vowel /æ/ before one of the consonants said to causing breaking.

As for how the dialects differed from the "original" Anglo-Saxon, well it depends on what you mean by that.  There are reconstructions for what is known as "Prehistoric Old English" (OE before it was written), but seeing how changes were always going on, it depends on exactly what time period you're talking about.  If you're talking about the language just before the migration period, you would just have to take all the changes that happened up to that period into account.  There were definitely changes from that period to recorded OE, such as palatalization and a-restoration.


----------



## berndf

Yondlivend said:


> Northumbrian also exhibits loss of n in the (bare) infinitive...


Why "(bare)"? Did the dative-infinitive retain the "n"?


----------



## Yondlivend

berndf said:


> Why "(bare)"? Did the dative-infinitive retain the "n"?


I put bare in parentheses because I wasn't sure whether the dative-infinitive lost it as well.  In West Saxon the uninflected infinitive ended in -an and the inflected in -enne (also -anne, from influence of the uninflected infinitive, plus other variations.  "The infinitive in Anglo-Saxon" has some information here).  From a preview of "Reconstructing Languages and Cultures" on Google Books, I found the following (source here):


> Campbell (1912: 302) wrote: "Of the major monuments only Vespasian Psalter has always -enne in the inflected infinitive.  In Early West Saxon -_a_- is introduced from the uninflected infinitive, and -_anne_ prevails beside rare -_onne_ and forms with _-n-_, but -_enne, -ene_ also occur.  The position is similar in Northumbrian, Ruthwell Gospels, early Kentish but Kentish glosses have only -_e(n)ne_."


----------



## Sepia

JMorg said:


> .
> 
> Danish looks at times quite a bit like English in my mind (and sounds like it too) but not sure about how it became separated or why but presumably Ingvaeonic has different grammatic innovations ; I am not sure about this.
> 
> ...
> 
> John Morgan
> geologist




Danish has a lot of similarity with English. So much that as soon as I could read (at the age of 6) I began learning English on my own from TV tuition programmes.
Some Jutish dialects have a certain sound that sometimes when I hear people speaking Scottish dialects I sometimes mistake them for Jutish until I listen closely and realize they are speaking English. 

However, how did English and Danish change so much and in such different directions? An English only speaking person would probably not understand any Danish. It seems to me that there used to be a lot of interaction between Scandinavia and the British Isles. Then came Christianity, small Kingdoms and Empires were founded and a lot of the peaceful and not so peaceful interaction was curbed. From the time where we were going all over the place in longships till the Middle Ages all Scandinavian languages and English changed a lot. Icelandic didn't. Iceland and Greenland were obviously of so little economic interest to anyone that nobody cared to force Christianity onto them and destroy their old culture. So their culture had a soft landing. They had time to learn to write their language in Latin alphabet. And this also enabled them to write down their old mouth-to-mouth-literature. I think that preserves a language. I don't buy the island-theory.
In Scandinavia and on the British Isles, had a religion imposed on them of which the main carrier language was Latin - a language that only but a few understood. They became less nomadic. Just like in Island also here, what a language is used for determines it development. It makes a difference if it is mainly used for communicating that you are bringing the cows back into the stable or you use it for retelling ancient and very complicated stories about gods and godesses, battles and heroes - poems describing magic and herbs with healing powers etc. - somethint that it, as it seems, was rather unhealthy after Christianity pacified the people and made them more or less the slaves of the noblemen and kings.

So thus accelerating the changes in the languages and at the same time reducing the interaction between the different regions of the north made the languages develop in differnt diretions.


----------



## Yondlivend

Just another note about palatalization of c:  it occurred in certain positions in West Saxon where it didn't in Anglian dialects, for example West Saxon ċearu and Anglian caru.  C was only palatalized before front vowels, and in Anglian the c followed a.  We have the Modern English word "care" from the word without the palatalized c, but "chary" from a word with a palatalized c (ċeariġ).  This is evidence for dialectal differences in OE, and there are likely several other examples.  We also have pairs of words that exhibit other dialectal differences such as fox and vixen, where the latter shows voicing in the initial consonant.  Though that change was, I believe, said to have its origins in either late OE or early Middle English.


----------

