ABSTRACT
Against Sievers’s claim (1886:356) that ‘haf is common to all the North Sea peoples, as a glance at Schade [1866: II, 372] could have told him’, Sarrazin declares (1886: 535): ‘haf, this shows itself by its late appearance as non-original, imported, for it is not to be proved on German soil before the 13th century; it is completely absent from Old Saxon…That the word got into the Frisian language is easy to understand; but it has remained completely foreign to Dutch to this day. Sievers’s remark that haf is, common to all the North Sea people is therefore not quite correct.’
