«Würzburg mark description» as an early monument of the Old High German language

Abstract

The article concerns the issues of discussion about the composition of the monuments of ancient German writing that are relevant to the history of the German literary language of the initial period, in particular the texts of agrarian law of the 8th century descriptions of land detours and demarcations of the Main Franconian region. The thesis of the clerical exclusivity of ancient German writing dominates by inertia in Russian historical Germanic studies. The relevance of the research carried out on the material of the unique monument of the so-called second description of the Wrzburg mark is associated with the approbation of an integrated approach to the analysis of the language and genre and stylistic affiliation of the text. The place of this source in the corpus of autochthonous texts of the VIII century from Wrzburg is determined. The research solves the problem of decoding the semiotic meanings contained in this old-written text, which is identified as a protocol for oral presentation. The main research methods are onomastic and component analysis (toponyms, anthroponyms), a toolkit of historical-stylistic, discursive and hermeneutic approaches using digital technologies. The genre content and linguistic characteristics of the monument are specified. The description of the Wrzburg demarcation and related texts is considered in the context of the linguistic situation of the VIIIXI centuries. The main conclusions of the study: as a small-format legal text, this monument has a special semantic nature, encodes valuable historical and cultural information, unique relics of the transitional early feudal era in Germany; its reference (referential) function, areаlogy, toponymic and anthroponymic semiotics are revealed through intertextual connections with other Old High German monuments of the XVIII century.