Old Frankish
| Old Frankish | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | formerly the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern France, Western Germany | |
| Language extinction: | Evolved into Old Low Franconian by the 6th century | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Old Frankish |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | gem | |
| ISO 639-3: | frk | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Old Frankish was the language of the Franks and it is classified as a West Germanic language. Once it was spoken in areas covering modern Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and adjacent parts of France and Germany.
The Franks first inhabited parts of the Netherlands and western Germany. From the 4th century they are attested as moving into the Roman Empire into what is now the southern Netherlands and northern Belgium. In the 5th and 6th century they expanded their realm and dominated Roman Gaul completely as well as client states such as Bavaria and Thuringen. The main difference between Frankish and neighbouring Germanic languages is that it is thought to be more 'celticised', probably by Belgic peoples, like for example the Menapii, whose language persisted in the realm of the Franks.
The language of the Franks had a significant impact on Old French. Old Frankish has introduced the modern French word for the nation, France, to mean "land of the Franks", but except from loanwords, French is not closely related to Frankish. By the year 900 Frankish had evolved into Old Low Franconian (including Old Dutch) in the area that was originally held by Franks of the 4th century, while in Valois and Île-de-France (Paris) it was replaced by Old French as the dominating language.
Old Frankish is only directly attested in a few words in the Lex Salica, and is mostly reconstructed from Old Low Franconian and loanwords in Old French. In the Lex Salica, the sentence Maltho thi, afrio lito or "I say to thee, I free you, half free" is probably the only full sentence in the Old Frankish.
The impact of Old Frankish on modern French
Most French words of Germanic origin came from Frankish (most of the others are English loanwords, see Franglais), often replacing the Latin word which would have been used. This can be shown with the examples in the table below.
| Old Frankish | Old French | Modern French | Latin | Modern Dutch | Modern English |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| warding | guardenc | gardien | custōs | verweerder | warden/guardian |
| skirmjan (verb) | escarmouche (noun) | escarmouche (noun) | leve proelium (noun) | schermutseling (noun) | skirmish (verb or noun) |
| bera | biere | bière | cervīsia | bier | beer |
| scoc (noun) | choc (noun) choquer (verb) | choquer (verb) | perculsus (noun) | schok (noun) | to shock / shock |
| grappon (verb) | graper (verb) | gripper (verb) | comprehendo (verb) | (be)grijpen (verb) | to grasp/to comprehend |
Frankish also had an influence on Latin itself; Latin words with Frankish roots include sacire, meaning "seize" (from Frankish sekjan, related to English "seek").
English also has many words with Frankish roots, usually through Old French eg. random (via Old French randon, from rant "a running"), scabbard (via Anglo-French *escauberc, from *skar-berg), grape, stale, march (via Old French marche, from *marka) among others.
Most Germanic words (especially ones from Frankish) with the phoneme w, changed it to gu when entering French and other Romance languages. Perhaps the best known example is the Frankish werra "to repel" (Compare English "war") which entered modern French as guerre and guerra in Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese.
See also
| Extinct Germanic languages |
|---|
| Burgundian · Gothic language · Lombardic · Norn · Crimean Gothic · Old Gutnish · Vandalic |
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