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    Co-occurrence with nominal human quantifiers
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    Oars else may occur with human quantifiers like immen somebody; other partitive adjective may do so.

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    Oars else is special in being able to co-occur with human nominal quantifiers, which are otherwise banned from the partitive adjective construction:

    1
    a. *Immen tûks
    somebody intelligent
    Someone intelligent
    b. Wat tûks
    something intelligent
    Something intelligent
    c. Immen oars
    somebody else
    Someone else
    d. Wat oars
    something else
    Something else

    Written Frisian has been claimed to preferably separate oars else from its nominal quantifier, but a count of the sequences nimmen oars nobody else and oars nimmen otherwise nobody in the Frisian Language Corpus indicates that this judgment is somewhat prescriptive:

    2
    a. ?Der wie nimmen oars foar te finen
    there was nobody else for to find
    There was nobody else to find
    b. Der wie oars nimmen foar te finen
    there was else nobody for to find
    They could not find anyone for that

    Count Frisian Language Corpus:

    Table 1
    nimmen oars nobody else 142
    oars nimmen otherwise nobody 64
    The quantifier nimmen nobody belongs to written language; it is in all likelihood subject to the influence of Dutch niemand nobody, which it resembles in form and meaning; note that it has been established that Frisian items which have a phonologically and semantically similar counterpart in Dutch are prone to morpho-syntactic influence from that counterpart (Slofstra (2009), Hoekstra (2011)). This is supported by comparing the frequencies for nimmen (oars) nobody (else) with those for the more colloquial quantifier gjinien (oars) no one (else), which lacks a Dutch counterpart *geeneen nobody. The sequence nimmen oars nobody else occurs more often than the sequence gjinien oars no one else, and the difference is statistically significant (p < 0.1 %).

    3
    a. ?Der wie gjinien oars foar te finen
    there was no.one else for to find
    There was no one else to find for that
    b. Der wie oars gjinien foar te finen
    there was else no.one for to find
    They could not find anyone for that

    Count Frisian Language Corpus:

    Table 2
    gjinien oars no one else 27
    oars gjinien otherwise no one 46
    Furthermore, in Early Modern Frisian the situation is the reverse of the one in Modern Frisian: the figures for nimmen oars nobody else show that the word order influenced by Dutch is less frequent than the 'native' word order (p = 3.8%).

    Early Modern Frisian (1550-1800):

    Table 3
    nimmen oars nobody else 1
    oars nimmen otherwise nobody 4

    References
    • Hoekstra, Eric & Versloot, Arjen2011Attraction between words as a function of frequency and representational distance: how words affect each other in the bilingual brain
    • Slofstra, Bouke, Hoekstra, Erik & Versloot, Arjen2009Een voorbeeld van gecamoufleerde taalbeïnvloeding: samenstellingsvormen van sjwasubstantieven in het FriesTaal en Tongval6121-44
    About this article
    Author(s): Eric Hoekstra
    Category: Frisian Syntax
    Keywords: human quantifiers
    Version: 1.0, December 2015
    Version history:
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    1.0 Eric Hoekstra December 2015
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