This article considers the art of translating from Dutch into Frisian by Jarich Hoekstra and Harke Bremer in De Grutte Barribal, a translation of one of the adventures of Ollie B. Bommel, a fictive gentleman created by Maarten Toonder and well-known in the Netherlands. I make an in-depth… read more
This article proposes a measure of the competitive strength of two rival patterns in the domain of a subgroup of irregular verbs in English. There is competition between simple pasts built on the vowels /æ/ and /ʌ/, and the same competition is found in the domain of past participles. As a result… read more
In standard Dutch, the plural suffix -en is homographic and homophonic with the linking suffix -en (boek+en “books”, boek+en+kast “bookcase”), both being pronounced as schwa. In Frisian, there is neither homography nor homophony (boek+en “books”, pronounced with syllabic nasal; boek+e+kast… read more
This article presents an overview of the changes that took place in the syntactic use of the quantifiers ea and oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 on the basis of the Frisian Language Corpus. Occurrences of Frisian ea and oait “ever” were classified and counted depending on the type of syntactic… read more
Since the 1970s, the use of the Dutch preposition van in the (semi-)quotative function has been noted by several linguists and language users as rapidly increasing in informal speech. In this sense, it can be compared to the English quotative marker like, which is also used to introduce direct… read more