Zur Frage der Ostfriesischen und dravänopolabischen Vokabulare

At the very last moment of their existence the threatened East-Frisian idioms of the Harlingen and Wursten regions and the Dravaenopolabian Slavonic of the Hanoverian Wend area were recorded and the languages thus preserved, if only partially, for research. These word-lists of East Frisian compiled in the late 17th Century the "Memoriale linguae Frisicae" by Cadovius Müller and the Wursten vocabulary by Lüder Westing, and on the other hand the "Vocabulaire Vandale" by the master of the Lüneburg "Ritterakademie", Pfeffinger, show striking similarities in the German or French part of their word-indexes. These similarities are not to be explained by direct contact and mutual influence, for Westing, Cadovius-Müller and Pfeffinger did their recording independently of one another. They result rather from the similarities of arrangement in scholarly Latin-German nomenclatores of the 17th Century.