The term Old High German (OHG, German: Althochdeutsch, German abbr. Ahd.) refers to the earliest stage of the German language German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason. There are, however, a number of Elder Futhark The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of the runic alphabet, used by Germanic tribes for Northwest Germanic and Migration period Germanic dialects of the 2nd to 8th centuries for inscriptions on artifacts such as jewellery, amulets, tools, weapons and runestones. In Scandinavia, the script was simplified to the Younger Futhark from the late 8th inscriptions dating to the 6th century (notably the Pforzen buckle The Pforzen buckle is a silver belt buckle found in Pforzen, Ostallgäu in 1992. The Alemannic grave in which it was found (no. 239) dates to the end of the 6th century and was presumably that of a warrior, as it also contained a lance, spatha, seax and shield. The buckle itself is assumed to be of Roman-Mediterranean origin, possibly the product), as well as single words and many names found in Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native, fluent speakers, Latin continues to be taught in schools and has been, and currently is, used in the process of new word production in modern languages from many texts predating the 8th century.

Characteristics

The main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as English, Dutch and Afrikaans, German, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish. The other two of these three traditional branches of the Germanic languages are the North and East Germanic languages from which it developed is that it underwent the Second Sound Shift or High German consonant shift In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost complete before the earliest written records in the High. This is generally dated very approximately to the late 5th and early 6th centuries—hence dating its start to around 500. The result of this sound change is that the consonant system of German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers remains different from all other West Germanic languages, including English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of and Low German Low German or Low Saxon is any of the regional language varieties of the West Germanic languages spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands. The historical sprachraum also includes contemporary northern Poland, the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia and a part of southern Lithuania. Grammatically, however, Old High German remained very similar to Old English Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon, Old Dutch Old Dutch is a linguistic term denoting the forms of West Franconian spoken and written during the early Middle Ages (c. 600 - 1150) in the Netherlands and the northern part of present-day Belgium. Old Dutch is considered the first stage in the development of a separate Dutch language and is succeeded by Middle Dutch in the later Middle Ages, and Old Saxon Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in Denmark by Saxon peoples. It is close enough to Old Anglo-Frisian that it partially participates in the.

By the mid 11th century the many different vowels In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A found in unstressed syllables had all been reduced to "e". Since these vowels were part of the grammatical endings in the nouns A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. In the following, an asterisk in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical and verbs In syntax, a verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that conveys action (bring, read, walk, run, murder), or a state of being (exist, stand). In most languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as, their loss led to radical simplification of the inflectional In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. Conjugation is the inflection of verbs; declension is the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns grammar of German. For these reasons, 1050 is seen as the start of the Middle High German Middle High German , abbreviated MHG (Mhd.), is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German. In some uses, the term covers a longer period, going up to 1500 period, though in fact there are almost no texts in German for the next hundred years.

Examples of vowel reduction Vowel reduction is the term in phonetics that refers to various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels , which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word , and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well in unstressed syllables:

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

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 A manuscript or handwrit is a recording of information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major dialects are typically demarcated by whole bundles of isoglosses; for example the Benrath line distinguishes High German from the other West Germanic languages; and the La information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based. For this reason the dialects may be termed monastery dialects.

The main dialects, with their bishoprics In some forms of Christianity, a diocese is an administrative territorial unit administered by a bishop. It is also referred to as a bishopric or Episcopal Area /episcopal see, though strictly the term episcopal see refers to the domain of ecclesiastical authority officially held by the bishop, and bishopric to the post of being bishop. The and monasteries Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer (e.g. an oratory) as well as the domestic quarters and workplace(s) of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone (hermits):

• Central German Central German is a group of High German dialects spread from the Rhineland to Thuringia, south of Low German and Low Franconian and north of Upper German. In older books, Central German is sometimes called Middle German
  • Middle Franconian West Central German belongs to the Central, High German dialect family in the German language. Its dialects are thoroughly Franconian including the following sub-families:: Trier Trier is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle River. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC, Echternach Echternach is a commune with city status in the canton of Echternach, which is part of the district of Grevenmacher, in eastern Luxembourg. Echternach lies near the border with Germany, and is the oldest town (current population 4,610) in Luxembourg, Cologne Cologne (German: Köln, pronounced [ˈkœln] ; Kölsch dialect: Kölle [ˈkœɫə]) is Germany's fourth-largest city (after Berlin, Hamburg and Munich), and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten
  • Rhine Franconian Rhine Franconian , or Rhenish Franconian, is a dialect family of West Central German. It comprises the German dialects spoken across the western regions of the states of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hesse in Germany. It is also spoken in northeast France, in the eastern part of the département of Moselle in the Lorraine region, and in the: Lorsch Lorsch is a town in the Bergstraße district in Hesse, Germany, 60 km south of Frankfurt. Lorsch is well known for the Lorsch Abbey, which has been named a World Heritage Site, Speyer Speyer is a city of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany with approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Located beside the river Rhine, Speyer is 25 km south of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. Founded by the Romans, it is one of Germany's oldest cities. The first known names were Noviomagus and Civitas Nemetum, after the Teutonic tribe, Nemetes, settled in the area, Worms Worms is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, on the Rhine River. At the end of 2004, it had 85,829 inhabitants, Mainz Mainz is a city in Germany and the capital of the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. It was a politically important seat of the Prince-elector of Mainz (see: Archbishopric of Mainz) under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of, Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁaŋkfʊɐt am ˈmaɪn] , English: /ˈfræŋkfərt/), commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2009 population of 667,330. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,295,000 in 2010. The city is at the centre
  • South Rhine Franconian: Weissenburg im Elsaß Wissembourg is a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Alsace in northeastern France
  • East Franconian East Franconian is a dialect which is spoken in northern Bavaria and other areas in Germany around Bamberg, Coburg, Würzburg, Hof, Bayreuth and Suhl. The major subgroup is Main-Franconian. The Vogtländisch and Erzgebirgisch dialects spoken in western Saxony (Vogtland and Ore Mountains region) around Plauen segue into Upper Saxon German: Fulda Fulda is a city in Hesse, Germany; it is located on the river Fulda and is the administrative seat of the Fulda district (Kreis), Bamberg Bamberg is a town in Bavaria, Germany. It is located in Upper Franconia on the river Regnitz, close to its confluence with the river Main. Bamberg is one of the few cities in Germany that was not destroyed by World War II bombings because of a nearby Artillery Factory that prevented planes from getting near to Bamberg. Bamberg is home to nearly 7,0, Würzburg Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian
  • Thuringian Thuringian is an East Central German dialect group spoken in much of the modern German Free State of Thuringia north of the Rennsteig ridge, southwestern Saxony-Anhalt and adjacent territories of Hesse and Bavaria. It is close to Upper Saxon German spoken mainly in the state of Saxony, therefore both are also regarded as one Thuringian dialect: (no texts)
  • West Franconian: conjectural dialect of the Franks in Northern Gaul Gaul is a historical name used in the context of Ancient Rome in references to the region of Western Europe approximating present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine

• Upper German Upper German is a family of High German dialects spoken primarily in southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy
  • Alemannic Alemannic German is a group of dialects of the Upper German branch of the Germanic language family. It is spoken by approximately ten million people in seven countries, including southern Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, Liechtenstein, Venezuela, and Italy. The name derives from the ancient Germanic alliance of tribes known as the Alamanni: Murbach, Reichenau Reichenau Island lies in Lake Constance in southern Germany, at approximately 47°42′N 9°4′E / 47.7°N 9.067°E , Sankt Gallen The Abbey of Saint Gall was for many centuries one of the chief Benedictine abbeys in Europe. It is located in the city of St. Gallen in present-day Switzerland. The Abbey has existed since 719 and became an independent principality during the 13th Century. It was founded by Saint Othmar on the spot where Saint Gall had erected his Hermitage. The. Strasbourg Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in north-eastern France. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin department. In 2006, the city proper had 272,975 inhabitants and its urban community 467,375 inhabitants. With 638,670 inhabitants in 2006, Strasbourg's metropolitan area ("aire
  • Bavarian Austro-Bavarian or Bavarian is a major group of Upper German varieties. Like standard German, Austro-Bavarian is a High German language, but they are not the same language. However, Austro-Bavarian and Standard German have influenced each other and nearly all Austro-Bavarian speakers speak Standard German as well: Freising Freising is a town in Bavaria, Germany, capital of the district Freising. Total population 48,500. The city is located north of Munich at the Isar river, near the Munich International Airport. Anyone taking off or landing at Munich airport can see the city to the north with its two famous hills, the cathedral hill with the bishop's castle and the, Passau Passau is a town in Lower Bavaria, Germany, known also as the Dreiflüssestadt (City of Three Rivers), because the Danube is joined there by the Inn from the South, and the Ilz coming out of the Bavarian Forest to the North, Regensburg Regensburg is a city in Bavaria, Germany, located at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers, at the northernmost bend in the Danube. To the east lies the Bavarian Forest. Regensburg is the capital of the Bavarian administrative region Upper Palatinate. The large medieval center of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Augsburg, Ebersberg, Wessobrunn, Tegernsee, Salzburg, Mondsee
  • Langobardic: (fragmentary, classification as OHG uncertain)

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 Rivers Elbe and Saale—in the Old High German period this area was occupied by Slavic peoples since the Völkerwanderung and was not settled by German speakers until the late 10th and the early 11th century
• the Langobardic dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century is assumed to have been an Upper German dialect, though little evidence of it remains apart from names and individual words in Latin texts, and a few inscriptions
• the Old Frankish language is a special case among the old West Germanic languages. The Frankish tribes built their empire at the same time as the High German consonant shift took place. This meant that the dialects of Frankish in the north of their empire, the Low Countries, did not shift, while the dialects in the south did. The dialects in the south are part of Old High German; the ones in the north are part of Old Dutch (Low Franconian).

Phonology

The charts1 show the vowel and consonant systems of the East Franconian dialect in the 9th century. This is the dialect of the monastery of Fulda, and specifically of the Old High German Tatian. Dictionaries and grammars of OHG often use the spellings of the Tatian as a substitute for genuine standardised spellings, and these have the advantage of being recognizably close to the Middle High German forms of words, particularly with respect to the consonants.

Vowels

Short and long vowels

Old High German had five phonemic long vowels and six phonemic short vowels. Both occurred in stressed and unstressed syllables.

Notes:

1. All back vowels likely had front-vowel allophones as a result of Umlaut. The front-vowel allophones likely became full phonemes in Middle High German. In the Old High German period, there existed [e] (possibly a mid-close vowel) from the Umlaut of /a/ and /e/ but it probably wasn't phonemicized until the end of the period. Manuscripts occasionally distinguish two /e/ sounds. Generally, modern grammars and dictionaries use ‹ë› for the mid vowel and ‹e› for the mid-close vowel.
2. The short high and mid vowels may have been articulated lower than their long counterparts as in Modern German. This cannot be established from written sources.
3. Short vowels followed later by long vowels tended to be reduced to ‹e› in unstressed syllables. The ‹e› may have represented [ɛ] or schwa [ə].
4. Vowel length was indicated in the manuscripts inconsistently (though not in modern handbooks). A macron was generally used to indicate a long vowel.^{[dubious – discuss]}

Old High German diphthongs are indicated by the digraphs ‹ei›, ‹ie›, ‹io›, ‹iu›, ‹ou›, ‹uo›.

Consonants

1. There is wide variation in the consonant systems of the Old High German dialects arising mainly from the differing extent to which they are affected by the High German Sound Shift. Precise information about the articulation of consonants is impossible to establish.
2. In the plosive and fricative series, where there are two consonants in a cell, the first is fortis the second lenis. The voicing of lenis consonants varied between dialects.
3. Old High German distinguished long and short consonants. Double-consonant spellings don't indicate a preceding short vowel as in Modern German but true consonant gemination. Double consonants found in Old High German include pp, bb, tt, dd, ck (for /kk/), gg, ff, ss, hh, zz, mm, nn, ll, rr.
4. /θ/ changes to /d/ in all dialects during the 9th century. The status in the Old High German Tatian (c. 830), reflected in modern Old High German dictionaries and glossaries, is that th is found in initial position, d in other positions.
5. It is not clear whether Old High German /k/ and /x/ had already acquired palatized allophones /c/ and /ç/, respectively, following front vowels as in Modern German.
6. A curly-tailed z (ȥ) is sometimes used in modern grammars and dictionaries to indicate the dental fricative which arose from Common Germanic t in the High German consonant shift, to distinguish it from the dental affricate, represented as z. This distinction has no counterpart in the original manuscripts, except in the OHG Isidor, which uses tz for the affricate.

Morphology

Nouns

Verbs

The following is a sample paradigm of a strong verb, nëman "to take".

History

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 conquest of the Lombards in 776, nearly all continental Germanic speaking peoples had been incorporated into the Frankish Empire, thus also bringing all continental West Germanic speakers under Frankish rule. However, since the language of both the administration and the Church was Latin, this unification did not lead to any development of a supra-regional variety of Frankish nor a standardized Old High German.

Old High German literacy is a product of the monasteries, notably at St. Gallen, Reichenau and Fulda. Its origins lie in the establishment of the German church by Boniface in the mid 8th century, and it was further encouraged during the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th. The dedication to the preservation of Old High German epic poetry among the scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance was significantly greater than could be suspected from the meagre survivals we have today (less than 200 lines in total between the Lay of Hildebrand and the Muspilli). Einhard tells how Charlemagne himself ordered that the epic lays should be collected for posterity.^[1] It was the neglect or religious zeal of later generations that led to the loss of these records. Thus, it was Charlemagne's weak successor, Louis the Pious, who destroyed his father's collection of epic poetry on account of its pagan content^{[citation needed]}.

Hrabanus Maurus, a student of Alcuin's and abbot at Fulda from 822, was an important advocate of the cultivation of German literacy. Among his students were Walafrid Strabo and Otfrid of Weissenburg. Notker Labeo (d. 1022) towards the end of the Old High German period was among the greatest stylists in the language, and developed a systematic orthography.^[2]

Texts

The early part of the period saw considerable missionary activity, and by 800 the whole of the Frankish Empire had, in principle, been Christianized. All the manuscripts which contain Old High German texts were written in ecclesiastical 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 Old High German text is generally taken to be the Abrogans, a Latin-Old High German glossary variously dated between 750 and 780, probably from Reichenau. The 8th century Merseburg Incantations are the only remnant of pre-Christian German literature. 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 the texts are assumed to derive from earlier copies.

The Bavarian Muspilli is the sole survivor of what must have been a vast oral tradition. Other important works are the Evangelienbuch (Gospel harmony) of Otfrid von Weissenburg, the short but splendid Ludwigslied and the 9th century Georgslied. The boundary to Early Middle High German (from ca. 1050) is not clear-cut. The most impressive example of EMHG literature is the Annolied.

Samples

The Lord's Prayer in four Old High German dialects. Because these are translations of a liturgical text, they are best not regarded as examples of idiomatic language, but they do show dialect variation very clearly.

Source: Braune/Ebbinghaus, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 17th edn (Niemeyer, 1994)

See also

• Middle High German
• Medieval German Literature

Notes

1. ^ Life of Charlemagne, 29: "He also had the old rude songs that celebrate the deeds and wars of the ancient kings written out for transmission to posterity."
2. ^ Rudolf von Raumer, Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die Althochdeutsche Sprache, Berlin, 1851, pp. 194-272.

References

• Althochdeutches Lesebuch, ed. W.Braune, K.Helm, E.A.Ebbinghaus, 17th edn, Tübingen 1994. ISBN 3-484-10707-3
• J. Knight Bostock, A Handbook on Old High German Literature, 2nd edn, revised by K.C.King and D.R.McLintock, Oxford 1976. ISBN 0-19-815392-9
• R.E.Keller, The German Language, London 1978. ISBN 0-571-11159-9
• Lexikon der Germanistischen Linguistik, ed. Hans Peter Althaus, Helmut Henne, Herbert Ernst Weigand, 2nd revised edition, Tübingen 1980. ISBN 3-484-10396-5
• S.Sonderegger, Althochdeutsche Sprache und Literatur, de Gruyter 1974 ISBN 3-11-004559-1
• C.J.Wells, German. A Linguistic History to 1945, Oxford 1987. ISBN 0-19-815809-2
• Wright, Joseph (1906). An Old High German Primer (Second Edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

External links

• Joseph Wright, An Old High German Primer (1906)
• Althochdeutsche Texte im Internet (8.–10. Jahrhundert) - links to a range of online texts
• Modern English-Old High German dictionary

Categories: Old High German

See Also:

• Proto-Germanic: Dictionary
• Old High German: Dictionary
• Frankish Language: Encyclopedia
• Germanic Languages: Encyclopedia
• Old French Language: Encyclopedia

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