the Frisian nations.’[1] We may probably trace three of them, of which the Hunsings would be one, in the three different amounts of tribal wergelds or compensations for injuries that prevailed in the ancient Frisian territory westward of the river Weser.[2]
The close relationship between the Anglo-Saxon and Frisian languages has been shown by Halbertsma and by Siebs among Continental scholars, and by philologists in our own country. This philological evidence supplies additional proof of the large Frisian element in the Anglo-Saxon settlement, in the comparison of the Frisian with the Old English or Anglo-Saxon language. On this subject Sweet says that the treatment of the letter a is almost identical in the two languages. In Frisian we find mon and noma alternating with man and nama (name). We find the same exceptional o in of, nosi (nose)—(O.E. nosu)—and the same change of a into æ; that in Frisian, which has no æ, is written e, as ik brec, bec, kreft, corresponding to the Old English bræc, bæc, and cræft. These changes, he says, do not occur in any of the other cognates, and could not, except by a most extraordinary coincidence, have been developed independently in English and in Frisian. They must therefore have already existed in Anglo-Frisian.[3] Frisian throws important light on the formation of the peculiar English diphthongs æ and œ. In the older Anglo-Saxon texts, including West Saxon, a is only diphthongised before r, and not before l, so that we have the typical forms ald and heard. In the oldest glossaries hard for heard is exceptional; but in a few old Northumbrian fragments hard predominates. The Frisian language similarly agrees in preserving a before l in al, half, galga, etc., while before r it is written e, doubtless
