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From: eric@flab.fujitsu.co.jp (Eric M. Visser)
Subject: Re: Flemish and Dutch
In-Reply-To: baitz@immr.tu-clausthal.de's message of Tue, 09 May 95 21:28:07 GMT
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Date: Thu, 11 May 1995 01:47:03 GMT
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baitz@immr.tu-clausthal.de (Stephan Baitz) wrote:

> I'd rather say, English would be a Frisian dialect. ;-)
> 
> In fact, the Frisian _language_ is quite old. I think, Old-Frisian belongs
> roughly to the same time as Old-Saxon and/or Anglo-Saxon. It was related to
> these languages and to Old-Low-German. So was the old English language.
> Modern Frisian could never be a dialect of (modern) English.
> (I might be wrong, perhaps a 'real' linguist can comment this.)

I remember reading somewhere (don't remember where) that Frisian split
up from whatever that protolanguage is called before Dutch and English
went their separate ways. In other words, Dutch would be the closest
relative of English (outside the British isles at least) historically,
even though apparently Frisian is closer (the closest) linguistically.

Mind you, I'm a computational linguist, not a real linguist, so I
don't really know what I'm talking about :-)

Cheers,

Eric.
--
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Eric M. Visser                         email: eric@flab.fujitsu.co.jp
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.              phone: 044 - 754 - 2671
Kawasaki, Japan                        fax  : 044 - 754 - 2570
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