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 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 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''