Re: American Dutch dialects

>
> All very interesting, the links and comments you provided. But did
> you think that Dutch is descended from Old Saxon, as your last
> sentence seems to suggest? Of course it is the modern
> representative of Old Low Franconian, which we have been discussing
> recently on the list (the Lex Salica and the other monastic vows
> whose manuscripts we've examined, and the first examples of
> Dutch/Flemish these contain (e.g. the "hebban olla vogala nestas
> hagunnan hinase hi(c) (e)nda thu w(at) (u)nbidan (w)e nu" and the
> "maltho thi afrio lito"/"maltho: the atomeo, theo"). But you know
> that already, don't you?
>
> Andrew
>

Yes, that's textbook stuff. But if there really is such a thing as a
subgroup deserving the name of Franconian languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconian_languages
it would have spread with the Frankish expansion, ie south and east,
out of the Netherlands, after the fall of Rome. That means explaining
Dutch as Franconian means calling Dutch Dutch, ie something that's
always been there. Undoubtedly it's Germanic, but since it's
surrounded by Old Saxon, the question is, how did it become Germanic,
and what's underneath it? There are places with names such as
Sassenheim in Zuid-Holland,
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassenheim
cf.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanem
so there must have been some Saxon presence.


Torsten