Abstract:
Despite the renewed interest in language contact and contact-induced change, an interesting problem on the crossroads between Germanic and Romance historical linguistics remains unsolved. This is the issue of the Germanic-like features in French that have alternatively been explained as contact-induced, inter genus drift and mere coincidence. In this talk, I will aim to bypass some of the traditional complications to the problem and put a new focus on the role that the northeastern border dialects of French may have played in the prehistory of the French language.
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Short bio
Peter Alexander Kerkhof is a historical linguist and philologist of the Old Germanic, Old Romance and Old Celtic languages. Peter Alexander worked as a PhD-lecturer in Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University from 2013-2016 and as an etymologist at the EVALISA project at Ghent University from 2016-2018. His research focusses on the value of prehistoric loanwords as a historical source in the interdisciplinary field between archaeology, early medieval history and historical linguistics. He has also published several popular science articles in Dutch and Belgian journals and magazines and has given multiple radio-interviews on the prehistory of Dutch.