History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 306

Some Middle Dutch phonological, morphological or lexical elements that survive in
French Flanders are : the omission of final -n in verbs, nouns and adverbs ending in en, the preterite ending -ede in weak verbs, and the persistence of mediaeval Dutch
words such as moude for ‘dusty earth’ (see WVD part I, fascicule 1, p. 87). The
survival of archaic elements can occur in any dialect, but nowadays they are often
confined to French Flanders only, e.g. zole for ‘plough’ (see WVDpart 1, fascicule,
Ploegen,p. 1).
Alienation from Other Dutch Dialects and Common Dutch by Communicative
Isolation
Older linguistic innovations coming from the east were still able to cross the state
border, but often only to a limited extent, so that the archaism only occurs in the
utmost western part of French Flanders. A good example is the map of the substitution
of the preposition ‘om’ .
Although the state border obviously did not prevent all local contact across the border,
the linguistic influence from Belgium has become very weak and restricted all the
same. Some word maps of the Woordenboek van de Vlaamse Dialecten (WVD,
Dictionary of the Flemish Dialects) enable us to reconstruct the relative chronology of
these diminishing contacts and influences. Barbed wire, for instance,was introduced
into the region about 1880. The typical West Flemish name for it is stekkerdraad.
This new word was only able to penetrate into a narrow strip along the border. The
inner part of French Flanders had already been cut off from West Flemish influence.
However, at the time the local dialect in this inner part was still vital enough to create
new words for the new thing, such as pieker- or fiekerdraad. The increasing influence
of French is also clear from the loan translation ijzerdraad (fromFr. fil de fer) and the
loanword barbelé (draad).
Recent Belgian changes, even in traditional agricultural vocabulary have not often
been able to cross the state boundary. A typical example is the name for the
threshing floor in the barn. In Belgian Flanders a Brabantic word dorsvloer has been
laid over an older Flemish schurevloer during the last century, but this evolution
decidedly stops at the state border (see WVD I, 2 Behuizing: 419).
The communicative isolation led to the expansion of some local characteristics to the
whole area of French Flanders, so that the state border became a secondary dialect
border in some respect.
A phonological example of indigenous evolution is the change from older sk to [š ].
Even in 1880, L. De Bo, the author of F