Butera, brād anda grēne cyse

In Boter, Brot and griene cheese I wrote that the Frisian sentence Bûter, brea en griene tsiis is often used to underline the similarity between Frisian and English. I made a few comments – about the difference in meaning between brea (rye bread) and brood, Brot and bread (wheat bread), about using the same characters for different sounds in all those languages and about the phonetic script – and ended with a few questions. In this piece I'm going to answer those questions.

Bûter, brea en griene tsiis

Relationship
The first question I asked at the end of the previous piece was: does Frisian indeed look more like English than Dutch or German? If I would examine the entire sentence from Bûter, brea... to ...oprjochte Fries, I could fill a thin book with it, so I limit myself to first part: bûter, brea en griene tsiis. All these five words have a common origin in all four languages. To avoid having to click back and forth all the time, I first add the two diagrams from the previous article below:

Bûter, brea en griene tsiis,	wa't dat net sizze kin,	is gjin oprjochte Fries.
butər brɪːə εn griː(ə)nə tsiːs	wa't dɒt nεt sezə kɪn	ɪs gjɪn ɔprjɔχtə ˈfriː(ə)s
Butter, bread and green cheese,	whoever cannot say that,	is no true Frisian.
ˈbʌtə(r) brεd ænd ɡriːn tʃiːz	huːˈevə(r) ˈkænɒt seɪ ðæt	ɪz nəʊ truː ˈfriːʒn
Boter, brood en groene kaas,	wie dat niet kan zeggen,	is geen oprechte / echte Fries.
botər brot εn γrunə ˈkaːs	wi dαt nit kαn zεγə(n)	ɪs γen ɔprεχtə / εχtə ˈfris
Butter, Brot und grüner Käse,	wer das nicht sagen kann,	ist kein wahrer Friese.
butə(r) broːt unt gryːnə(r) ˈkɛːzə,	veːr dαs nɪçt sagən kαn	ɪst kain vaːrə(r) ˈfrizə

If we look at the current pronunciation, the Frisian bûter most closely resembles a combination of German and Dutch. The first piece (morpheme) of the word has the same sound as the German Butter, while the second morpheme sounds more like that of the Dutch boter. With brea the sound is closer to English bread, since Dutch and German both have an /o/ sound. It is also noteworthy that only in Frisian the /t/ sound at the end of the word is expired. The word en is identical in Frisian and Dutch, and the sound of English and comes very close. Only German has taken a different path with und. With griene there are again the two camps mentioned more often, Frisian and English compared to Dutch and German, with Frisian and English in particular being very similar. The same applies to tsiis and cheese versus kaas and Käse. In bûter, brea en griene tsiis, three of the five Frisian words look most like English and there is only one Frisian word that looks more like German and Dutch than English. Not a bad score. Should you draw conclusions from this about the relationship between languages ​​in general? No, of course not; that's already evident from the continuation of the sentence alone. But it is understandable that this sentence is often used as an example to underline the relationship between Frisian and English.

The Frisian gold
In the introduction to my previous contribution I wrote: "There are many words and expressions that go back centuries and are inextricably linked to the culture of the area in which they are used." This also applies to bûter, brea en griene tsiis. What that sentence has to do with local culture? That starts with the butter. That churned cream was, and I paraphrase 11en30.nu, 'an iconic export article since the Middle Ages. The price of this 'Frisian gold', as it was also called, is a kind of stock market index in the economic history of the province. It reached a boom in the nineteenth century.' I already mentioned the brea last time: that was once the staple food in Friesland. And then there is the griene tsiis. According to Wikipedia in Dutch, that was a Frisian clove cheese made from skimmed milk, to which taste and color were given by adding the juice of certain green plants such as parsley. The Online Etymology Dictionary also mentions that, but it states that the name was originally (late 14th century) referring to the fact that it was fresh cheese. So all these products are closely related to the Frisian rural culture, and Grutte Pier ('Great Pier') probably knew them from his daily life.

Shibboleth
That brings us to the third question I asked: why is bûter, brea en griene tsiis called a shibboleth? The term shibboleth is from the Bible. In the book Judges in chapter 12 verse 5-6 is described how soldiers who had survived had to say 'shibboleth'. If they pronounced it well, they would live, but if they said "sibboleth", they would be killed on the spot. According to the myth, Grutte Pier applied the same trick, but with the sentence wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries. According to Wikipedia, he is said to have used that to check whether the crew of ships on the Zuiderzee were Frisian. Even apart from the question whether this saga is based on truth, it is unlikely that Grutte Pier pronounced those words exactly. Pier Gerlofs Donia lived from about 1480-1520, and back then New Frisian wasn't yet spoken. It is therefore an anachronism to put those words into his mouth. That may seem unimportant, but if you put the Old Frisian that he probably spoke alongside the precursors of Dutch, German and English that were spoken in those days, you get a completely different story. With that it's important to know that the Old Frisian period does not coincide with Old Dutch, Old German and Old English. In the days of Pier, Dutch was in the transition period from Middle Dutch to Early New Dutch, Low German in the transition from Middle Low German to New Low German and English somewhere on the border of Middle English and Early New English. High German was in the Early New High German phase.

Butera, brād anda grēne cyse
Around 1500 there were no standard languages ​​with a fixed spelling as there are today. In the various etymological dictionaries I consulted, for the Middle Dutch word for boter (butter) for example I found botre, botere, botter and butter. And it could very well be that there are more variants. On top of that there is a difference in spelling: kaas and caes seem to be different words for cheese, but the pronunciation probably was almost – or maybe even completely – the same. After all, a 'c' for an 'a' is pronounced as a 'k', and the 'e' in caes is an 'extension-e', indicating that the 'a' has a long sound. Moreover, we must of course make do with the resources we have. For example, I couldn't find what the Old Frisian word for cheese is and for English I could not find all words in Middle English. What is italic is Old English. With the Early New High German, I did the same with the Middle High German. All in all I come to the following overview:

Old Frisian	butera / botera	brād	and(a) / and(e) / end(e)	grēne	???
Early New English	butere	bread	and	grene	cese / cyse
Middle Dutch	bot(e)re / botter / butter	broot	end(e) / en(n)	groen(e)	kase / kese / caes
Middle Low German	botter / boter	brōt	unde / ende / inde	gröne	kese
Early New High German	buter	brōt	und(e) / unt	grüene	kæse

Now, of course it isn't possible to say with certainty which variant Grutte Pier and his men spoke, but the Frisian at the time (in all the above-mentioned variants) was much closer to the variants that occurred in Middle Dutch than the current Frisian is to the New Dutch spoken today. That makes the story of Grutte Pier much more exciting: it really comes down to nuances in the pronunciation, so the chance of them taking an enemy for a friend is much greater. In addition, the above overview makes it much more understandable that the Frisians exported a lot of butter to England, because the country was not only reasonably close, but people could also make themselves understood in their own language. Because there's not much difference between butera, braad anda grene cese and butere, bread and grene cese. Or cyse. Or however the Frisian butter traders may have pronounced it.