Old High German
Old High German (OHG; German: Althochdeutsch (Ahdt., Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally identified as the period from around 500/750 to 1050. Rather than representing a single supra-regional form of German, Old High German encompasses the numerous West Germanic dialects that had undergone the set of consonantal changes called the Second Sound Shift.
"Old German" redirects here. For other uses, see Old German (disambiguation).Old High German
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Germanic
- West Germanic
- Old High German
- West Germanic
At the start of this period, dialect areas reflected the territories of largely independent tribal kingdoms, but by 788 the conquests of Charlemagne had brought all OHG dialect areas into a single polity. The period also saw the development of a stable linguistic border between German and Gallo-Romance, later French.
Old High German largely preserved the synthetic inflectional system inherited from its ancestral Germanic forms. The eventual disruption of these patterns, which led to the more analytic grammar, are generally considered to mark the transition to Middle High German.
Surviving Old High German texts were all composed in monastic scriptoria, so the overwhelming majority of them are religious in nature or, when secular, belong to the Latinate literary culture of Christianity. The earliest instances, which date to the latter half of the 8th century, are glosses—notes added to margins or between lines that provide translation of the (Latin) text or other aid to the reader.
Periodisation[edit]
Old High German is generally dated from around 750 to around 1050.[1][2] The start of this period sees the beginning of the OHG written tradition, at first with only glosses, but with substantial translations and original compositions by the 9th century.[2] However the fact that the defining feature of Old High German, the Second Sound Shift, may have started as early as the 6th century and is complete by 750, means that some take the 6th century to be the start of the period.[a] Alternatively, terms such as Voralthochdeutsch ("pre-OHG")[3] or vorliterarisches Althochdeutsch ("pre-literary OHG")[4] are sometimes used for the period before 750.[b] Regardless of terminology, all recognize a distinction between a pre-literary period and the start of a continuous tradition of written texts around the middle of the 8th century.[5]
Differing approaches are taken, too, to the position of Langobardic. Langobardic is an Elbe Germanic and thus Upper German dialect, and it shows early evidence for the Second Sound Shift. For this reason, some scholars treat Langobardic as part of Old High German,[6] but with no surviving texts — just individual words and names in Latin texts — and the speakers starting to abandon the language by the 8th century,[7] others exclude Langobardic from discussion of OHG.[8] As Heidermanns observes, this exclusion is based solely on the external circumstances of preservation and not on the internal features of the language.[8]
The end of the period is less controversial. The sound changes reflected in spelling during the 11th century led to the remodelling of the entire system of noun and adjective declensions.[9] There is also a hundred-year "dearth of continuous texts" after the death of Notker Labeo in 1022.[5] The mid-11th century is widely accepted as marking the transition to Middle High German.[10]
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 dialects may be termed "monastery dialects" (German Klosterdialekte).[14]
The main dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:[15]
In addition, there are two poorly attested dialects:
The continued existence of a West Frankish dialect in the Western, Romanized part of Francia is uncertain. Claims that this might have been the language of the Carolingian court or that it is attested in the Ludwigslied, whose presence in a French manuscript suggests bilingualism, are controversial.[15][16]
Writing system[edit]
Old High German marked the culmination of a shift away from runic writing of the pre-OHG period [21] to Latin alphabet. This shift led to considerable variations in spelling conventions, as individual scribes and scriptoria had to develop their own transliteration of sounds not native to Latin script.[22] Otfrid von Weissenburg, in one of the prefaces to his Evangelienbuch, offers comments on and examples of some of the issues which arise in adapting the Latin alphabet for German: "...sic etiam in multis dictis scriptio est propter litterarum aut congeriem aut incognitam sonoritatem difficilis." ("...so also, in many expressions, spelling is difficult because of the piling up of letters or their unfamiliar sound.")[23] The careful orthographies of the OHG Isidor or Notker show a similar awareness.[22]
Syntax[edit]
Any description of OHG syntax faces a fundamental problem: texts translated from or based on a Latin original will be syntactically influenced by their source,[38] while the verse works may show patterns that are determined by the needs of rhyme and metre, or that represent literary archaisms.[39] Nonetheless, the basic word order rules are broadly those of Modern Standard German.[40]
Two differences from the modern language are the possibility of omitting a subject pronoun and lack of definite and indefinite articles. Both features are exemplified in the start of the 8th century Alemannic creed from St Gall:[41] kilaubu in got vater almahticun (Modern German, Ich glaube an Gott den allmächtigen Vater; English "I believe in God the almighty father").[42]
By the end of the OHG period, however, use of a subject pronoun has become obligatory, while the definite article has developed from the original demonstrative pronoun (der, diu, daz)[43] and the numeral ein ("one") has come into use as an indefinite article.[44] These developments are generally seen as mechanisms to compensate for the loss of morphological distinctions which resulted from the weakening of unstressed vowels in the endings of nouns and verbs (see above).[c][d]