Fraternity Manuals

Old High German

From Open Encyclopedia

The term Old High German (OHG, German: Althochdeutsch) refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th Century, though single words and many names are found in Latin texts before this. For this reason, some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of Old High German proper to 750.

The main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects from which it developed is that it underwent the Second Sound Shift or High German consonant shift. This is generally dated very approximately to the late 5th and early 6th centuries - hence dating the start of OHG to around 500. The result of this sound change is that the consonant system of German remains different from all other West Germanic languages, including English and Low German. Grammatically, however, Old High German remained very similar to Old English and Old Saxon.

By the mid 11th century the many different vowels found in unstressed syllables had all been reduced to 'e'. Since these vowels were part of the grammatical endings in the nouns and verbs, their loss led to radical simplification of the inflectional grammar of German. For these reasons, 1050 is seen as the start of the Middle High German period, though in fact there are almost no texts in German for the next hundred years.

Examples of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables:

    Old High German     Middle High German     English
    machôn     machen     make
    taga     tage     days
    demu     dem     to the

(The Modern German forms of these words are broadly the same as in Middle High German.)

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Dialects

There was no standard or supra-regional variety of Old High German - every text is written in a particular dialect, or in some cases a mixture of dialects. Broadly speaking, the main dialect divisions of Old High German seem to have been similar to those of later periods - they are based on established territorial groupings and the effects of the Second Sound Shift, which have remained influential until the present day. But because the direct evidence for Old High German consists solely of manuscripts produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based. For this reason the OHG dialects may be termed monastery dialects.

The main OHG dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:

There are some important differences between the geographical spread of the Old High German dialects and that of Modern German:

  • no German dialects were spoken east of the River Elbe - in the OHG period this area was occupied by Slavic peoples and was not settled by German speakers until the 12th century
  • the Langobardic dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century may have been an Upper German dialect, though little evidence of it remains
  • the Franks conquered Northern Gaul as far south as the Loire; the linguistic boundary later stabilised approximately along the course of the Maas and Moselle, with Frankish speakers further west being romanised.

With Charlemagne's defeat of the Lombards in 776, all High German speaking peoples had been incorporated into the Frankish Empire. The Saxons and the Frisians were also conquered by Charlemagne, bringing all continental West Germanic speakers under Frankish rule. However, since the language of both the adminstration and the Church was Latin, this unification did not lead to any development of a supra-regional variety of German until the emergence of Early Modern High German.

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Texts

The early part of the period saw considerable missionary activity, and by 800 the whole of the Frankish Empire had, inprinciple, been Christianised. All the manuscripts which contain Old High German texts were written in ecclesiatical scriptoria by scribes whose main task was writing in Latin rather than German. Consequently, the majority of Old High German texts are religious in nature and show strong influence of ecclesiastical Latin on the vocabulary. In fact, most surviving prose texts are translations of Latin originals. Even secular works such as the Hildebrandslied are often preserved only because they were written on spare sheets in religious codices.

The earliest OHG text is generally taken to be the Abrogans, a Latin-Old High German glossary variously dated between 750 and 780, probably from Reichenau. The earliest texts not dependent on Latin originals would seem to be the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunn Prayer, both recorded in manuscripts of the early 9th Century, though both texts are assumed to derive from earlier copies.

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See also

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External Links

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Sources

  • Althochdeutches Lesebuch, ed. W.Braune, K.Helm, E.A.Ebbinghaus, 17th edn, Tübingen 1994. ISBN 3484107073
  • J. Knight Bostock, A Handbook on Old High German Literature, 2nd edn, revised by K.C.King and D.R.McLintock, Oxford 1976. ISBN 0198153929
  • R.E.Keller, The German Language, London 1978. ISBN 0571111599
  • Lexikon der Germanistischen Linguistik, ed. Hans Peter Althaus, Helmut Henne, Herbert Ernst Weigand, 2nd revised edition, Tübingen 1980. ISBN 3484103965
  • S.Sonderegger, Althochdeutsche Sprache und Literatur', de Gruyter 1974 ISBN3110045591
  • C.J.Wells, German. A Linguistic History to 1945, Oxford 1987. ISBN 0198158092de:Althochdeutsch

it:Alto tedesco antico pl:Język staro-wysoko-niemiecki

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