Old High German


Old High German 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 High German [consonant shift|Second Sound Shift].
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 the margins or between lines that provide translation of the text or other aid to the reader.

Periodisation

Old High German is generally dated from around 750 to around 1050. The beginning of this period marks the emergence of the Old High German written tradition initially limited to glosses, but by the 9th century, it included substantial translations and original compositions. 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. Alternatively, terms such as Voralthochdeutsch or vorliterarisches Althochdeutsch are sometimes used for the period before 750. 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.
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. There is also a hundred-year "dearth of continuous texts" after the death of Notker Labeo in 1022. The mid-11th century is widely accepted as marking the transition to Middle High German.

Territory

Old High German encompasses the dialects that had undergone the Second Sound Shift during the 6th century—namely all of the Upper and Central German dialects.
The Franks in the western part of Francia gradually adopted Gallo-Romance by the beginning of the OHG period, with the linguistic boundary later stabilised approximately along the course of the Meuse and Moselle in the east, and the northern boundary probably a little further south than the current boundary between French and Dutch. North of this line, the Franks retained their language, but it was not affected by the Second Sound Shift, which thus separated the [Old Dutch|Low Franconian or Old Dutch varieties] from the more easterly Franconian dialects which formed part of Old High German.
In the south, the Lombards, who had settled in Northern Italy, maintained their dialect until their conquest by Charlemagne in 774. After this the Germanic-speaking population, who were by then almost certainly bilingual, gradually switched to the Romance language of the native population, so that Langobardic had died out by the end of the OHG period.
At the beginning of the period, no Germanic language was spoken east of a line from Kieler Förde to the rivers Elbe and Saale, earlier Germanic speakers in the Northern part of the area having been displaced by the Slavs. This area did not become German-speaking until the German eastward expansion of the early 12th century, though there was some attempt at conquest and missionary work under the Ottonians.
The Alemannic polity was conquered by Clovis I in 496, and in the last twenty years of the 8th century Charlemagne subdued the Saxons, the Frisians, the Bavarians, and the Lombards, bringing all continental Germanic-speaking peoples under Frankish rule. While this led to some degree of Frankish linguistic influence, the language of both the administration and the Church was Latin, and this unification did not therefore lead to any development of a supra-regional variety of Frankish nor a standardized Old High German; the individual dialects retained their identity.

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 dialects may be termed "monastery dialects".
The main dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:
In addition, there are two poorly attested dialects:
  • Thuringian, a Central German dialect, is attested only in four runic inscriptions and some possible glosses.
  • Langobardic was the dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century, and little evidence of it remains apart from names and individual words in Latin texts, and a few runic inscriptions. It declined after the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks in 774. It is classified as Upper German on the basis of evidence of the Second Sound Shift. Some scholars exclude Langobardic from Old High German because of its poor state of preservation.
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.

Literacy

Old High German literacy is a product of the monasteries, notably at St. Gallen, Reichenau Island and Fulda. Its origins lie in the establishment of the German church by Saint 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. Einhard tells how Charlemagne himself ordered that the epic lays should be collected for posterity. 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.
Rabanus Maurus, a student of Alcuin and later an abbot at Fulda, was an important advocate of the cultivation of German literacy. Among his students were Walafrid Strabo and Otfrid of Weissenburg.
Towards the end of the Old High German period, Notker Labeo was among the greatest stylists in the language, and developed a systematic orthography.

Writing system

Old High German marked the culmination of a shift away from runic writing of the pre-OHG period to the 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. 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." The careful orthographies of the OHG Isidor or Notker show a similar awareness.

Phonology

The charts 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

Old High German had six phonemic short vowels and five phonemic long vowels. Both occurred in stressed and unstressed syllables. In addition, there were six diphthongs.
Notes:
  1. OHG came from PWGmc *ē. It passed from *ē to to to.
  2. # * > hia
  3. OHG came from PWGmc *iu. This OHG diphthong was one of the sources for the Middle High German monophthong.
  4. # * > diutisk
  5. OHG came from PWGmc *ai. PWGmc *ai monophthongized to OHG before certain consonants:,, and from PWGmc *h.
  6. # * > stein
  7. # * > rēho
  8. OHG came from PWGmc *ō. It passed from *ō to to to.
  9. # * > muot
  10. OHG came from PWGmc *eu. It passed from *eu to to.
  11. # * > liod
  12. OHG came from PWGmc *au. PWGmc *au monophthongized to OHG before certain consonants:,,,,,,, and from PWGmc *h.
  13. # * > boum
  14. # * > ''tōd''

Reduction of unstressed vowels

By the mid 11th century the many different vowels found in unstressed syllables had almost all been reduced to .
Examples:

Consonants

The main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects from which it developed is that the former underwent the Second Sound Shift. The result of the sound change has been that the consonantal system of German is different from all other West Germanic languages, including English and Low German. The shift applied to different extents onto various dialects, added to other interdialectal variations, this makes a single "High German" system and precise articulations details thereabout difficult to reconstruct.
Notes:
Old High German distinguished long and short consonants. Double-consonant spellings indicate not a preceding short vowel, as they do in Modern German, but true consonant gemination. Double consonants found in Old High German include pp, bb, tt, dd, ck, ''gg, ff, ss, zz, hh, mm, nn, ll, rr.''

Phonological developments

This list has the sound changes that transformed Common West Germanic into Old High German but not the Late OHG changes that affected Middle High German:
  • , >, in all positions
  • * PwGmc * > OHG sib, PwGmc * > OHG gestaron
  • High German consonant shift: Inherited voiceless plosives are lenited into fricatives and affricates, and voiced fricatives are hardened into plosives and in some cases devoiced.
  • * Ungeminated post-vocalic,, spirantize intervocalically to,, and elsewhere to,,. Cluster is exempt. Compare OE slǣpan to OHG.
  • * Word-initially, after a resonant and when geminated, the same consonants affricatized to, and, OE tam: OHG.
  • ** Spread of > is geographically very limited and is not reflected in Modern Standard German.
  • *, and are devoiced.
  • ** In what ultimately gave rise to Standard German, this applies to in all positions but to and only when they are geminated. PwGmc * > brucca > Brücke, but * > liogan > lügen.
  • *ē and *ō are diphthongized into and, respectively.
  • Proto-Germanic *ai became ei except before,, and word-finally, when it monophthongizes into ē, which is also the reflex of unstressed *ai.
  • * Similarly, *au > ō before, and all dentals; otherwise, *au > ou. PwGmc *dauþu > OHG ', but *haubud > '.
  • ** refers there only to inherited from PIE *k, not to the result of the consonant shift, which is sometimes written as.
  • merges with under i-umlaut and u-umlaut but elsewhere is . In Upper German varieties, it also becomes before labials and velars.
  • fortifies to in all German dialects.
  • Initial and before another consonant are dropped.

Morphology

Verbs

Tense

Germanic had a simple two-tense system, with forms for a present and preterite. These were inherited by Old High German, but in addition OHG developed three periphrastic tenses: the perfect, pluperfect and future.
The periphrastic past tenses were formed by combining the present or preterite of an auxiliary verb with the past participle. Initially the past participle retained its original function as an adjective and showed case and gender endings - for intransitive verbs the nominative, for transitive verbs the accusative. For example:

After thie thö argangana warun ahtu taga

"When eight days had passed", literally "After that then gone-by were eight days"

Latin: Et postquam consummati sunt dies octo


phīgboum habeta sum giflanzotan

"There was a fig tree that some man had planted", literally "Fig-tree had certain planted"

Latin: arborem fici habebat quidam plantatam

In time, however, these endings fell out of use and the participle came to be seen no longer as an adjective but as part of the verb, as in Modern German. This development is taken to be arising from a need to render Medieval Latin forms, but parallels in other Germanic languages raise the possibility that it was an independent development.
Germanic also had no future tense, but again OHG created periphrastic forms, using an auxiliary verb skulan and the infinitive, or werden and the present participle:

Thu scalt beran einan alawaltenden

"You shall bear an almighty one"


Inti nu uuirdist thu suigenti'

"And now you will start to fall silent"

Latin: Et ecce eris tacens

The present tense continued to be used alongside these new forms to indicate future time.

Conjugation

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

Syntax

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, while the verse works may show patterns that are determined by the needs of rhyme and metre, or that represent literary archaisms. Nonetheless, the basic word order rules are broadly those of Modern Standard German.
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: kilaubu in got vater almahticun.
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 and the numeral ein has come into use as an indefinite article. 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.

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 of Otfrid von Weissenburg, the Ludwigslied and the 9th century Georgslied. The boundary to Early Middle High German is not clear-cut.
An example of Early Middle High German literature is the Annolied.

Example texts

The Lord's Prayer is given in four Old High German dialects below. 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.

Grammars