Mith frethe to wasane ‘To be in Peace’ Remnants of the Instrumental and Locative Case in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Old Frisian

The case system in Old Frisian is commonly described as including four cases: nom., gen., dat., acc. Only a few lexical or onomastic relics are said to attest to the former existence of an instrumental and a locative case. Closer scrutiny, however, shows that a morphologically distinct instrumental and locative case were fairly consistently applied in some declensional classes, at least in some dialects of Old Frisian (c. 1250-1400). Traces are in particular found in texts from the Ems Frisian region, but are also attested in Codex Unia, reflecting Old West Frisian. The instrumental ending was PFri *-u < PIE *-oh1 throughout (nearly) all declensional classes, a uniformity typical for a case with a low frequency. The origin of the PFri locative ending *-i, restricted to the masculine a-stems, remains unclear. The reconstructed distribution of case endings found for the earliest stages of Old Frisian largely parallels the situation in ninth century Old Saxon.