High German Research Articles

La Belle et la Bête

The aim of this research is to assess, quantitatively and qualitatively, the aesthetic judgments passed on languages in the French and German-speaking parts of Switzerland. The focus will be on attitudes toward the informant's own language(s) as well as other languages, such as Italian, Romansh, High German, Spanish, Dutch, Latin, English or any other languages that the informants encountered during their lifetime. Judgments about languages are always part of an aesthetic linguistic universe; that is, they are not autonomous but form a system. Attitudes are learnt and therefore shaped by an individual' s cultural background.

Perception of Disease in Late Middle Ages and Rhetoric of Verbal Interaction with It (Based on the Material of Middle High German Medical Incantations of the 15<sup>th</sup> Century)

This article examines methods of verbal interaction with disease in Middle High German medical incantations on the material of three charms of the 15th century aimed at healing fever, apoplexy and purulent disease. The analyzed texts are of special interest since they have never been discussed in such types of research before and have never been translated into Russian, whilst they may provide some useful material for typological studies within the German charm literature as well as within the Germanic and Indo-European traditions. In addition, they demonstrate a characteristic mixture of the old pagan and new Christian mentality, in which disease (and, therefore, the fear of death) is depicted as an element of the gloomy archaic Lower World (represented, however, by the Devil), and the hope of salvation (healing) is associated with miraculous power of Christianity (that is, monotheistic religion), represented by the names of Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary and the holy evangelical apostles. Thus, Christian authorities and relics occupy the place of the old pagan Upper World in this hybrid picture of the world, manifested in incantations. All the texts are printed in the original in the transcription by V. Holzmann (Holzmann V. “Ich beswer dich wurm und wyrmin…”: Formen und Typen altdeutscher Zaubersprüche und Segen. Bern, 2001, 322 S.) with our translation into Russian and necessary comments. In this article we speculate upon the specifics of the perception of disease in Medieval German charms as heterogeneous and hostile substance originated in the Lower World and propose our typology of Middle High German medical incantations, which is based on three main types of communicative strategies supplied with text examples. The conclusions arrived at may interest specialists in the German language history and literature as well as folkloristic, culture studies and medicine of the Middle Ages.

Battle of Lepanto in Fuggerzeitung Collection

The role of the Fuggers and the "Fuggerzeitung" in the early modern period has long been known. However, more research is needed on the status of news about the Ottoman Empire and the Turks. The document, published here for the first time, reveals the Fuggerzeitung as an important source of Turkish history. The impact of the Battle of Lepanto in Europe, as is usually written, was greater than it actually was. The reasons for this are based both on the special situation of those who took part in the war in favor of the Holy Alliance and the sectarian conflicts between Protestants and Catholics that was going on in Central Europe at that time because there was also a propaganda war going on. Most of the publications dealing with the struggle between the Christians and the Ottoman Empire were in the early new high German language. Therefore, cooperation between Turkish and German scientists is needed for future research.

A contact-induced strategy of femininisation

Abstract Middle Dutch and Middle High German possess a femininizing suffix ‑erse, of which reflexes survive in some modern dialects. Its Old Germanic preform arose from the grafting of Latin ‑issa onto the masculine suffix *‑ārja‑ in Dutch and German dialects closest to the Gallo-Romance area in the Early Middle Ages. The main aim of the present contribution is to provide hitherto underexposed details on the Dutch linguistic area, to show that the mainstream historical explanation for ‑erse in Dutch historical linguistics must be given up, and to provide a unified and more detailed account for the rise of this suffix formation in the medieval contact zone between Gallo-Romance and Germanic.

Formen und Funktionen des Konjunktivs II in historischen ostoberdeutschen Predigten.

This article presents a diachronic survey of forms and functions of the subjunctive II grammatical category in historical German. The subjunctive II is historically based on the subjunctive preterit form but has lost its temporal function and become a purely modal category. It has developed a variety of synthetic and analytical forms since Old High German, especially in vernacular varieties, but also in Standard German, and fulfils a range of functions, chiefly that of non-affirmativity. The present study aims to shed light on the historical development of the subjunctive II’s form and function. Its focus is on East Upper German, and its temporal scope spans over a millennium from the 9th to the 19th century. In order to study the usage and development of the subjunctive II in historical East Upper German sermons, the south-eastern part of SermonC, a diachronic corpus of historical German sermons, is analysed. While this (sub‑)corpus is restricted in terms of region and genre, it provides a unique window to written language usage, variation and change in a clearly defined domain over a very long time. The results show that the refunctionalization of the subjunctive preterit as a purely modal category does not date to prehistoric times, as is generally assumed; instead, they point to the 11th century as the likely time for this change, with limited temporal uses persisting into the 15th century. The 15th century is also the time when the synthetic subjunctive II form with -et/-at, a typical feature of Bavarian dialects, seems to have emerged in the spoken register. Analytical forms started to appear from the 13th century, and the periphrasis with würde, today accepted in Standard German, prevailed among several written German analytical variants in the 18th century. While Standard German has preserved the distinction between two subjunctive categories, East Upper German spoken language has in effect reduced a two-way morphological system (tense and mood) to a pure mood system, with tense expressed syntactically, in effect refunctionalizing morphological tense as a mood marker.

Entwicklung und Durchsetzung der Monoflexion im 18. Jahrhundert

Abstract In this paper, it is argued that the principle of monoinflection governing the distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection in the New High German noun phrase (NP) definitively became established in the 18th century. Empirical evidence for this assumption is provided by the findings of three corpus studies based on the historical corpus ›Deutsches Textarchiv‹ (German Text Archive). Focusing on three different constructional types within the NP, the evolving distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection is studied for the period from 1600 to 1900. Based on the findings of the three corpus studies, further structural tendencies in the (re)organization of the New High German NP and their interaction with the principle of monoinflection are discussed.

Geheimnis und Verborgenes im Mittelalter: Funktion, Wirkung, und Spannungsfelder von okkultem Wissen, verborgenen Räumen und magischen Gegenständen

Geheimnis und Verborgenes im Mittelalter: Funktion, Wirkung, und Spannungsfelder von okkultem Wissen, verborgenen Räumen und magischen Gegenständen

“As Soon as a Man Comes to Life, He Is Old Enough to Die”: Heidegger and Chapter XX of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen

Abstract In section 48 of Being and Time, Heidegger quotes from chapter XX of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, a late medieval prose poem written in Early New High German, circa 1400: “As soon as a man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.” In this paper, I provide the context for the quotation. I also suggest that Heidegger’s interest in Der Ackermann cannot be explained solely in terms of his believing the poem was the source of the quotation on page 245 of Being and Time. I offer a justification for this claim by showing that Heidegger’s discussion of death in Being and Time employs three important images: “debt,” “inheritance,” and “ripeness” – all of which can be found in chapter XX Der Ackermann. I show these “borrowings” to be at once a reference to the context of the Christian/humanist heritage to which they belong and a part of the newly evolving Daseinsanalytik.

Mechanisms of sub-phonemic change in prescriptive bilingualism: The case of Mexican Plautdietsch

This paper investigates the relationship between loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing by looking at at an enclave of the Mexican Plautdietsch speech community in Texas. Plautdietsch (ISO 639-3, pdt) borrowings from Mexican Spanish sometimes undergo loanword adaptation to fit the native phonological system (e.g. Spanish [peso] peso 'peso' > Plautdietsch [pəɪzo]), but some community members exhibit a borrowed pattern of deaffrication that targets native lexical items (e.g. [dit͡ʃ ]) 'German' > [diʃ]). I suggest that the output of /t͡ʃ/ deaffrication in Mexican Plautdietsch follows a pattern of deaffrication closer to that of regional Mexican Spanishes, rather than an inherited pattern that adapts loanwords from High German and Russian. I propose that while some mechanisms of phonetic and phonological interpretation are similar for both loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing, the novel Mexican Spanish pattern could have only entered the community due to the unique structure of phonological representation associated with advanced bilingualism. This prediction is borne out in the social distribution of deaffrication wherein men, who are expected to become advanced bilinguals, exhibit the innovation more than women. By adding a dimension of phonological representation to our models of loanword adaptation, we can expand the model's behavior to also account for outcomes involving the restructuring of heritage languages.

The development of the Old High German umlauted vowels and the reflex of New High German /ɛ:/ in Present Standard German

A critical reconstruction of the development of the Old High German umlauted vowels sheds light on the phonological history of various vocalic phonemes and in particular of /ɛ/ and /e/ as well as of /ɛ:/ and /e:/. The changes that affected the two pairs led to different results in the New High German Schriftsprache, in which today’s /ɛ:/ beside /e:/ in words with “long ä” (e. g. spät) is not an artificial vowel based on the spelling, but a historical variant with a phonological history behind it.

Werdenand Periphrases with Present Participles and Infinitives: A Diachronic Corpus Analysis

The scholarship on the Modern German periphrastic future, or thewerdenfuture (that is,werden+ infinitive) has brought forth different hypotheses about its origins. One of these hypotheses states that it developed fromwerden+ present participle in the 13th century (for example, Bech 1901). While many have criticized this hypothesis, no one until now has proposed a valid solution for the problem. In this study, I carried out a comprehensive examination of the instances ofwerdenin combination with present participles and infinitives in Middle and Early New High German. The analysis indicates that althoughwerden+ present participle andwerden+ infinitive were often used in similar contexts, the former construction was not the source from which thewerdenfuture emerged. Old High German data also show the use ofwerden+ infinitive, which suggests that it was already well established in the first two centuries of the Middle High German period. This provides evidence against the view that the construction developed as late as the 13th century. I also address the grammaticalization process thatwerden+ infinitive underwent during the Early New High German period and suggest that it culminated in the 16th century.

On the discourse pragmatics of German wh-headlines

AbstractThis paper deals with autonomous uses of German subordinate wh-interrogatives as headlines, so-called wh-headlines (e.g.Was Kinder brauchen, ‘What children need’), which we approach from a discourse-pragmatic and diachronic perspective. We take our starting point in the QUD-based, discourse-pragmatic model of interrogatives as proposed by Rosemeyer (this issue). Applying this model, first, to the case of wh-headlines in present-day news discourse, we develop the hypothesis that a writer in using a wh-headline may explicitly introduce an implicit QUD into discourse without posing it as an information-seeking question. In a second step, we assess this hypothesis with respect to the use of wh-headlines in various genres from the Middle High German and Early New High German periods, for which we provide three in-depth case studies. The case studies are contextualized against the backdrop of reflections on potential impact factors in the diachronic evolvement of this particular writing practice. Overall, the results of our study can be taken to lend support to our hypothesis also for genres other than news discourse and for time periods other than modern German.

Stability parameter as the aspect of studying the evolution of lexical synonymy in the language of the Middle High German epic (on the example of denominations of weapon)

Based on the example of synonymic chains as part of the lexical-thematic group of denominations of weapon in the Middle High German epic, this article demonstrates the use of the stability parameter of lexical synonyms for studying the evolutionary processes in language lexicon. Correlation between the stability parameter and the sphere of historical lexicology is drawn based on the concepts of lexical, nominative and semantic stability of the word offer by I. A. Ershova. The concept of word stability implies the presence of at least two chronological periods for comparison, which includes the stability parameter into the paradigm of methods for studying the evolution of language lexicon. This research highlights two stages in the history of German literature of the High Middle Ages: pre-courtly epic and courtly romance. Examination of the stability of lexical synonyms in the language of the Middle High German epic reveals the functionality and restrictions of this method of studying the evolution of lexicon. Reduction of the absolute values of stability parameter of the separate elements of synonymic chain to the parameter of relative stability of the entire row provides a systemic description of the evolution of lexical synonymy in the Middle High German language. Comparison of the three types of stability for different synonymic chains with transformations within their structure alongside the synonyms leads to the conclusion on the role of stability parameter in studying the evolutionary processes in lexicon as a manifestation of their presence or absence, as well as a means for determining the development vector of language vocabulary. The restrictions of this method are associated with the need to prove or expand the data on evolution of lexicon using cultural-historical and stylistic analysis.

Reichenbach meets underspecification

AbstractThis paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementingReichenbach’s (1947)classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.

Wirnt von Grafenberg, Wigalois

Abstract For the first time, the alliterating word-pairs in Wirnt’s von Gravenberg “Wigalois” are completely listed and analyzed, especially in comparison with previous attestations in Old and Middle High German. Thus, the comprehensive history of the alliterating word-pair in German moves into the second decade of the thirteenth century, by which time over 1,500 such pairs are recorded. References to Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven “Lanzelot,” often considered together with “Wigalois,” are included. Texts thought to be similar do not necessarily reveal a comparable phraseological inventory, while the authors appear to employ a similar strategy of creating new pairings.

The Old Frisian Ten Signs in the Host

Abstract Old Frisian religious texts are relatively scarce. In fact, several pastoral pieces survive amongst the large body of Old Frisian legal texts. In this context, the fifteenth-century legal collection known as Thet Autentica Riocht (‘The Authentic Law’) is of special interest because it includes a sequence of short didactic texts, dealing with Christian topics. The present study focuses on The Ten Signs in the Host, one of the catechetical texts of Thet Autentica Riocht. It presents a discussion of the text, its Latin sources, their manuscript tradition, and a Middle High German analogue of the Old Frisian text.

Немецкие диалекты Алтая: к данным последней экспедиции

The paper presents the results of a linguistic expedition to the settlements of the German National Region in Altai. The German language dialectal forms identified can be attributed to the Low German and High German language areas. High German forms are of a mixed nature, including the dialects of both the Middle and South German types. Despite sharing common phonetic features, each of the Upper German dialects in Altai has its own set of features, with some features identified for the first time, for example, nasalization in the Kamyshi village dialect. All Middle German dialects are characterized by incomplete consonant movement and grammatical features. South German dialects also have some peculiarities: full movement of consonants, “hissing” consonant combinations, pronoun mer (we). The High German dialects of the Altai show the features of the original mother dialects and new features acquired due to mixing and leveling processes. A conclusion is made about the impossibility of identifying the dialectal forms precisely. The Low German language substratum is found to be represented by the dialects of the Mennonite Germans. The analysis of the linguistic features has found the speech of the Mennonite Plautdietsch speakers in Altai to be significantly similar to the speech of the Low German Mennonite dialect speakers of the Novosibirsk region. Also, some sociolinguistic components identified during a survey of speakers of different German language dialects were analyzed: self-identification, linguistic competence, attitude towards native dialect.

Contact, Variation, Distance

The article focuses on the specific North German language formation which is primarily characterized by language contacts of Low German und High German. While a structural separation of these two languages can be observed from a historical point of view, contact phenomena and variation phenomena bridge the gap between High German and Low German today. These phenomena have led to the emergence of new regiolects. As a first step, contact phenomena and also idiosyncratic features in Low German are described qualitatively. As a second step, the speaker repertoires are outlined by their contact and distance patterns from a quantitative perspective and bundled into profile types. The data base is formed by audio recordings of 26 Low German speakers collected in the project „Language Variation in Northern Germany“.

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Reviewed by: Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai Elaine Margolin László Krasznahorkai Chasing Homer Trans. John Batki. New York. New Directions. 2021. 91 pages. HUNGARIAN AUTHOR László Krasznahorkai is gifted with seductive powers that force us to go wherever he goes; we simply cannot negate him. In Chasing Homer, his anxious first-person narrator careens at breakneck speed through the vastness of Europe’s haunted spaces. We wonder why he is running so fast and from what. We know nothing about him; not his name, or whether he is a parent or father or husband or someone’s lover, or even if he is a good or decent man. He offers no confessions. Yet in a few short paragraphs we are entranced by the lusciousness and foreignness of his impossibly long sentences, which are unencumbered by any internal pressure to come to an end. His suffering becomes ours. We understand he’s under attack—by men who have deemed him unworthy to live—but he offers no clues as to why they want him dead. What was his transgression? Was there one? We aren’t really certain other than knowing that they simply want him to die. It’s not that we are naïve. We know that this last century has seen millions of men and women die for no reason at all; so many at the death camps in Europe, but Krasznahorkai, or rather his unnamed alter ego, never speaks of the Holocaust or any other atrocity directly. He seems disgusted by man’s barbarity to man in all its reincarnations. He describes for us proudly how he has survived this long in intricate passages telling us about the ingenious ways he slips in and out of a crowd without being noticed, or how he is able to remain hidden in the hull of a boat for days at a time without being detected. Krasznahorkai’s protagonist focuses his intention on surviving, which requires him to keep moving, often in counterintuitive directions, to throw off those chasing him. He finds remaining constantly vigilant exhausting. We don’t sense he yearns for any human contact, and he never reminisces about someone he misses from his past. It seems the fight to stay alive has extinguished all other preoccupations. One might think this would distance us from him, but the unfathomable thing is his ability to create in us strong feelings for him despite his obliviousness. We feel his agony and want to help, but he continues to ignore us. His narrative is enhanced by melancholy portraits by German painter Max Neumann that are for the most part indecipherable. The first one we see is a simple line drawing of a man with his eyes blacked out, and another painting shows three men in shadow seemingly scanning an interminable landscape. Another shows a man with a bat seemingly preparing to defend himself against a gang of pursuers whose faces are shielded from view. The book is also accompanied by the madly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós, made available to the reader by QR codes, which adds to the apocalyptic tension that ripples through his prose. I recall only one time when his voice possessed yearning for a past now long gone. “I never received any training in the skills my life now depends on,” he writes; “my education was about different things entirely. I’d been taught Old High German and Ancient Persian and Latin and Hebrew, and they’d instructed me in Mandarin and Japanese of the Heian era.” We wonder why he is telling us this. Do we hear the faintest drops of some sort of latent elitism for an earlier time? We aren’t certain. All that is clear is he remembers this time with a happiness that is no longer present and we wonder if this joy had something to do with providing for him some moral guidance in a world that already confused him. It occurs to the reader that his prose is strangely silent with regard to moral reckonings of any kind. The author shies away from philosophical assertions, choosing instead to angrily riff on the idiocy of mice and his...

Glossenstudien: Ergebnisse der neuen Forschung ed. by Rolf Bergmann and Stefanie Stricker

Reviewed by: Glossenstudien: Ergebnisse der neuen Forschung ed. by Rolf Bergmann and Stefanie Stricker Robin Cummins Rolf Bergmann and Stefanie Stricker, eds., Glossenstudien: Ergebnisse der neuen Forschung ( Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020), 403 pp. The field of gloss studies has made the transition to the digital age only with difficulty: the materiality of most gloss entries already makes digital study difficult, and many manuscripts remain undigitized, making study of these works impossible for anyone without the ability to travel to where these manuscripts are housed. Furthermore, despite the age of its subject matter, new discoveries of glosses are also continually being made, adding to the amount that remains undigitized and often undiscussed. Even among digitized manuscripts, some aspects of gloss studies receive less attention than others. By describing many of these issues and offering ways forward, Rolf Bergmann and Stefanie Stricker provide a thorough overview and entryway into many recent discoveries of gloss studies, and their book serves as a useful tool for any scholar whose work touches on glosses. In their introduction, Bergmann and Stricker outline three major goals for their book: to convey recent knowledge in gloss studies, to articulate potential avenues for future research, and to articulate the cultural and historical-linguistic importance of glosses. The majority of the book is devoted to the first aspect, and the editors provide a very thorough list of manuscripts that have been newly found to contain glosses. Although this particular list is presented with very little commentary, its inclusion offers a wealth of potential avenues of research for scholars seeking to examine the new gloss data. The book also contains incredibly thorough lists and descriptions of glosses. These gloss descriptions are divided into different categories for different chapters, such as chapters focusing on the material used to write these glosses (such as glosses etched with the stylus), on glosses in certain scriptoria (such as the monastery at St. Gallen), or on glosses to works by certain popular early medieval authors (e.g., Prudentius). Each entry reflects how the gloss is written in the manuscript alongside a brief description of the Old High German or Old Saxon gloss's context within the Latin text. Due to the lack of images and a slightly inconsistent method of describing how the word is written in the manuscript (missing or unclear characters are sometimes written with either a <.> or a <?>), some of the glosses are hard to visualize. Bergman and Stricker do, however, often reference their useful online database of glosses, BStK Online, where many of these glosses are referenced with links to digitized versions (when available). Most entries also give brief interpretations of the glosses, particularly when a word is difficult to identify or when its relationship with the text is not entirely clear. Because of the large amount of glosses discussed, the majority of entries do not go into much detail, but other sources are often cited or readily available online. Despite this lack of in-depth information, these descriptions do offer potential for future research. Bergmann and Stricker also heavily highlight digitalization as an avenue for future development in the field of gloss studies. They list all gloss-containing manuscripts that have yet to be digitized and offer several digital resources that have arisen recently in the realm of gloss studies. With the spread of COVID-19, and with so many manuscripts being held in so many different places, the ability to access many of these glosses and their commentaries is immensely helpful to scholars around the world, and it is good that this book highlights that [End Page 235] importance. This list is also helpful for scholars looking to see if a manuscript they are interested in has yet to be digitized. After this discussion of digitization, another section of the book discusses the linguistic importance of glosses. It not only describes the phonological and morphological aspects of glosses but also briefly outlines the syntactic information that can be gleaned from them, a topic often neglected in the scholarship. The rendering of the Latin ablative case with an Old High German periphrastic construction is one example of syntactic information that Bergmann and Stricker describe. Despite the short length of glosses...