Old Frisian compounds: kinship terms

Abstract

Together with derivation, compounding is one of the most important word-building processes in the world languages. In the Germanic languages, compounding has become extremely productive (Müller, 2015). As opposed to studies in other Old Germanic languages, compounding in Old Frisian (OFr) has not been investigated in full. Unlike in the neighbouring languages, only a small number of OFr lexemes is present in the most comprehensive book on Old Germanic nominal compounds (Carr, 1939). The semantic field of kinship terms includes basic concepts reflected in the lexis of a language. A lot of OFr kinship terms are compounds. The questions posed in this paper are what compounding models are used to build up OFr kinship terms: (1) in terms of the Sanskrit classification, (2) in terms of parts of speech used as the constituents, (3) in terms of the semantic connection between the constituents. In order to do that, compound structures are split into constituents and then formally analyzed. Statistical analysis reflects the productivity of compounding patterns and the balance between the trends. Thereafter, the formal data are compared to the semantic patterns identified within the compounds. The end goal is to assess the degree of the interconnection between the morphological and semantic levels. The data can be used to compare the trends in OFr and in the related Old Germanic languages in order to contribute to the theory of compounding in Germanic.