THE RUNIC FRISIAN VOWEL SYSTEM: THE EARLIEST HISTORY OF FRISIAN AND PROTO-INSULAR NORTH FRISIAN

Noun Incorporation in Frisian

Noun incorporation in Frisian (Dyk 1997) is unusual because it shows certain restrictions that are not seen in other languages with noun incorporation, such as Mohawk and Chukchi. In addition, while others argue that noun incorporation is indeed possible in Germanic (see Booij 2009 for Dutch, Barrie and Spreng 2009 for German), Frisian is unusual even with respect to Germanic in allowing noun i...

Regional variation of Saterland Frisian vowels

This paper reports on the acoustic investigation of Saterland Frisian vowels, including their regional variation. The study aims at identifying merged vowel categories as well as supplementary acoustic dimensions, which enhance the discrimination of spectrally adjacent categories. All vowels were elicited in a /hVt/ frame. Acoustic measurements included vowel duration, mid-vowel F1 and F2, Vowe...

Fryss: a First Step towards Frisian Tts

In this MA-project a Dutch TTS system based on Festival, NeXTeNS, has been changed step by step into a Frisian system. As for many minority languages, Frisian too has very few digital resources. So, the challenge of this project is to make the system as intelligible as possible with minimal resources. The resulting TTS system is called FRYSS. At the end of the thesis period an evaluation was ca...

The Position of Frisian in the Germanic Language Area

Cross-linguistic vowel variation in Saterland: Saterland Frisian, Low German and High German

This study investigates the vowel space of trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German. The three vowel systems show differences in the number of distinct categories but share the majority of vowel qualities. The speakers were instructed to read vowels of all three languages in a /hVt/ frame. We examine whether the dispersion and size of the vowel space as well as inte...