The Words for “Blue” in Old Frisian

Abstract

The Old Frisian lexicon contains two words for ‘blue’: wēden, related to OE wǣden (MoE woaden arch.), OHG weitīn (MoG waiden arch.), and MLG wêden, with adjectival suffix *-īna stemming from PGmc *waida-, waidina- ‘woad, plant yielding blue dye’. The other one is blāw, a loanword through Middle Dutch or Middle Low German (from French), which is cognate with OE blǣhǣwen, OHG blāo, plāo, and ON blár, from PGmc *blēwa- < IE *bhel- ‘shining’ (cf. Lat. flavus ‘golden yellow’). This article analyses the occurrences of the words wēden and blāw in the Old Frisian text corpus in order to determine and contextualize the various semantic fields covered by these lexemes.