Ritchie was wondering about the Friese.
Hazlitt, in the Oxford dictionary of proverbs, has:
Bread, butter, and green cheese,
Very good English, very good Friese.
Ritchie:
"Look up the history of the Frisii, ancestors of today’s Friesan peoples, and
you find interesting stuff. They are mentioned by Romans as opponents in an
account which includes the Chauci and the Angles and the Saxons. Wikipedia
says that the, “Anglo-Saxons of England and the early Frisians were formed from
largely identical tribal confederacies and so their respective languages were
very similar.” I don’t know what “*largely* identical” means but I’m
interested to find that the Frisian language group is now divided into mutually
unintelligible languages: West Frisian (spoken by my Dutch neighbor and 350,000
or so others), Saterland Frisian, spoken by 2,000 people in the German
municipality of Saterland and North Frisian, spoken by 10,000 Germans in North
Frisia, on the west coast of Jutland."
Well, it might be argued that Grice was a Friese. When Grice was at Oxford, he
browsed through Henry Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon Primer," for the sake of it. Sweet
speaks sweetly of the "Anglo-Frisian" as being a language that, as Hazlitt
would note, is largely identical to itself: only in English AND Friese you have
the 'ch' in 'cheese' pronounced as you do, and the vowels in 'bread', 'butter,
and 'green' pronounced as you do.
Grice later consulted Campbell's "Old English" and he noted that Campbell
quotes the Friesians as, according to Procopius, having come to England, along
with the Angles. So it is mighty possible that H. P. Grice had Friesian blood
in his veins -- if we go by Procopius.
Tacitus went even further. He called the Anglo-Frisians: "Ingvaeones", and
"Ingvaeonic" was one of Grice's favourite adjectives (He did adjectives with
Austin -- "I am feeling Ingvaeonic today". Tacitus was clear: England is thus
called because of its triangular shape. The Angles came from Angeln which was
not exactly a Platonic perfect 'triangle', but something that LOOKED like a
triangle. Unlike Saxony and Jutland and Friesland, places which brought the
Saxons and the Jutes and the Friese to England (and Scotland), only ANGELN
remained totally uninhabited: ALL of the Angles then living in ANGELN left
Angeln in what Henry Sweet called the "Great Migration".
Grice argued that whatever you can implicate in English you can implicate in
Friesian, too.
"Ask Mata Hari," he would utter in support of this thesis.
Grice's favourite monument in Leeuwaarden (the Friesian way to spell Leuwert)
is known by the locals as "Mum" and it represents one of Grice's favourite
mammals: a Friesian cow. So there.
Cheers,
Speranza
