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This article considers the art of translating from Dutch into Frisian by Jarich Hoekstra and Harke Bremer in De Grutte Barribal, a translation of one of the adventures of Ollie B. Bommel, a fictive gentleman created by Maarten Toonder and well-known in the Netherlands. I make an in-depth comparison and analysis of a sample of Dutch sentences and their Frisian translations. The success of the translation resides in the following factors: (1) the translation is more specific, more sensorial or more subjective than what is conveyed by the somewhat more abstract Dutch language; (2) in specifying things, the translators have a perfect feeling of contextual information, based on a correct estimation of the plot and the characters. My observations link up with the view of translation as the rendering of spirit and style (Brogan 1993; for theory construction, see also Nida & Taber 1969; Venuti 2012, 2013; Verstegen 1993).

Dit artikel geeft een beknopt overzicht van de belangrijkste overzichtswerken en instrumenten op het gebied van de frisistiek, die geschreven zijn in het Engels of het Nederlands. Het is bedoeld als een provisorisch handvat voor neerlandici en anderen die in hun onderwijs of onderzoek een plaatsje, groot of klein, voor het Fries of Friesland (Fryslân) willen inruimen. Het artikel beperkt zich tot eigentijdse werken en tot het Fries gesproken in Nederland (in internationaal taalgebruik: West Frisian).

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The Frisian arbitrary pronoun men is analysed here as a deficient pronoun (Cardinaletti & Starke 1996), since it does not allow of expansion of its projection by means of premodification, coordination or relativisation. Furthermore, men occurs adjacent to the tensed verb in main clauses and to the complementiser in embedded clauses. To explain these data, we suggest that men is case licensed in PF under adjacency by means of a head head relation, being deficient as a maximal projection. The relation between case and deficiency is further reflected in the deficient (or suppletive) morphological case paradigm of men. Evidence is presented that the paradigm of men in written Frisian originated in the 16th-17th centuries by suppletion of forms of the indefinite pronoun ien/jin ‘one’. Out of these arose the reflexive object form of the arbitrary pronoun men: jin, and as its reflexive jin thus truly became part of men’s paradigm.

This longitudinal study investigated to what extent the acquisition of cognates among bilingual children depends on the degree of cross-language similarity and intensity of exposure to the tested language, and whether children’s sensitivity to cognates with different degrees of cross-language similarity changes over time. For three consecutive years, 120 Frisian-Dutch bilingual children were tested on their Frisian receptive vocabulary. The sample was split into three groups that differed with respect to intensity of exposure to Frisian at home. In the receptive vocabulary task, cross-language similarity was systematically manipulated through four cognate categories, differing in their degree of overlap between Frisian and Dutch. The results showed a gradual cognate facilitation effect for children with a low intensity of exposure to Frisian. The higher the degree of cross-language similarity, the better their performance. This implies that the co-activation of the two languages depends on the degree of cross-language similarity. Over time, their performance improved the most on non-identical cognates with a cross-linguistic phonological regularity between Frisian and Dutch. This suggests that as they grow older, children with a low intensity of exposure to Frisian become better at recognizing regularities in the overlap of the Frisian and Dutch phonological systems.

Frisian is a minority language, taught at least one hour a week in primary schools. As a result, Frisian literature occupies a smaller position in the educational system than Dutch literature, since Dutch is the national language. This chapter discusses systematically the position of fiction and literature in the various types of education in primary schools, secondary schools, universities and courses for adults. Special attention is given to the way in which officially established attainment goals affect the end term requirements set for the final examinations.