Old Saxon


Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German. It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons, a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony. It partially shares Anglo-Frisian's Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch, Luxembourgish and German.
The grammar of Old Saxon was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, three grammatical numbers, and three grammatical genders. The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only.

Characteristics

Relation with other West Germanic languages

In the early Middle Ages, a dialect continuum existed between Old Dutch and Old Saxon, a continuum which has since been interrupted by the simultaneous dissemination of standard languages within each nation and the dissolution of folk dialects. Although they share some features, a number of differences separate Old Saxon, Old English, and Old Dutch. One such difference is the Old Dutch utilization of -a as its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employ -as or -os. However, it seems that Middle Dutch took the Old Saxon a-stem ending from some Middle Low German dialects, as modern Dutch includes the plural ending -s added to certain words. Another difference is the so-called "unified plural": Old Saxon, like Old Frisian and Old English, has one verb form for all three persons in the plural, whereas Old Dutch retained three distinct forms.
Old Saxon probably evolved primarily from Ingvaeonic dialects in the West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic in the 5th century. However, Old Saxon, even considered as an Ingvaeonic language, is not a pure Ingvaeonic dialect like Old Frisian and Old English, the latter two sharing some other Ingvaeonic characteristics, which Old Saxon lacked.

Relation to Middle Low German

Old Saxon naturally evolved into Middle Low German over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, with a great shift from Latin to Low German writing happening around 1150, so that the development of the language can be traced from that period.
The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction, which took place in most other West Germanic languages and some Scandinavian dialects such as Danish, reducing all unstressed vowels to schwa. Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan or dagō became gesprēken and dāge.

Phonology

Early developments

Old Saxon did not participate in the High German consonant shift, and thus preserves stop consonants p, t, k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates. The Germanic diphthongs ai, au consistently develop into long vowels ē, ō, whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei, ou or ē, ō depending on the following consonant.
Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic after a consonant, e.g. hēliand . Germanic umlaut, when it occurs with short a, is inconsistent, e.g. hebbean or habbian "to have". This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjective krank had the comparative forms krenker and kranker. Apart from the e, however, the umlaut is not marked in writing.

Consonants

The table below lists the consonants of Old Saxon. Phonemes written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes.
Notes:
  • The voiceless spirants,, and gain voiced allophones when between vowels. This change is only faithfully reflected in writing for . The other two allophones continued to be written as before.
  • Fricatives were devoiced again word-finally. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period, stops became devoiced word-finally as well.
  • Most consonants could be geminated. Notably, geminated gave, and geminated probably gave ; Geminated resulted in.
  • Germanic *h is retained as in these positions and thus merges with devoiced.

Vowels

Notes:
  • Long vowels were rare in unstressed syllables and mostly occurred due to suffixation or compounding.

Diphthongs

Notes:
  • The closing diphthongs and sometimes occur in texts, probably under the influence of Franconian or High German dialects, where they replace Old Saxon developments and .
  • The situation for the front opening diphthongs is somewhat unclear in some texts. Words written with in the Heliand, the most extensive record of Old Saxon writing, are often found written variably with or even in most other texts, notably the later ones. The diphthong eventually merges into in almost every Middle Low German dialect except southeastern Eastphalian.
  • There also existed 'long' diphthongs, and. These were, however, treated as two-syllable sequences of a long vowel followed by a short one, not proper diphthongs.

Grammar

Morphology

Unlike modern English, Old Saxon was an inflected language rich in morphological diversity. It kept five out of the six distinct cases of Proto-Germanic: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental.
Old Saxon also had three grammatical numbers and three grammatical genders. The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of exactly two.

Nouns

Old Saxon nouns were inflected in very different ways following their classes. Here are the endings for dag, an a-stem masculine noun:
At the end of the Old Saxon period, distinctions between noun classes began to disappear, and endings from one were often transferred to the other declension, and vice versa. This happened to be a large process, and the most common noun classes started to cause the least represented to disappear. As a result, in Middle Low German, only the former weak n-stem and strong a-stem classes remained. These two noun inflection classes started being added to words not only following the historical belonging of this word, but also following the root of the word.

Verbs

The Old Saxon verb inflection system reflects an intermediate stage between Old English and Old Dutch, and further Old High German. Unlike Old High German and Old Dutch, but similarly to Old English, it did not preserve the three different verb endings in the plural, all featured as -ad. Like Old Dutch, it had only two classes of weak verb, with only a few relic verbs of the third weak class.
This table sums up all seven Old Saxon strong verb classes and the three weak verb classes:
It should be noticed that the third weak verb class includes only four verbs ; it is a remnant of an older and larger class that was kept in Old High German.

Syntax

Old Saxon syntax is mostly different from that of modern English. Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection – e.g., word order was generally freer. In addition:

Orthography

Old Saxon comes down in a number of different manuscripts whose spelling systems sometimes differ markedly. In this section, only the letters used in normalized versions of the Heliand will be kept, and the sounds modern scholars have traditionally assigned to these letters. Where spelling deviations in other texts may point to significant pronunciation variants, this will be indicated.
In general, the spelling of Old Saxon corresponds quite well to that of the other ancient Germanic languages, such as Old High German or Gothic.
  • and were both used for. However, it seems that, as in other West-Germanic dialects, when was followed by or, it had the pronunciation or. The letters and were preferred for the palatalisations, and even sometimes being rather used before, or for .
  • represented or its allophone : brengian 'to bring', seggian 'to say', wege 'way'.
  • seems, at least in a few dialects, to have had the pronunciation or at the beginning of a word, only when followed by or. Thus we find giār 'year' and even gēr 'year', the latter betraying a strong Old Frisian influence.
  • represents and its allophone : holt 'wood', naht 'night'.
  • is used for both the vowels and and the consonant : ik 'I', iār 'year'.
  • and always represent : quāmun 'they came'.
  • represented, and between two vowels also.
  • is used to indicate : thōhtun 'they thought'. is used for, occasionally also written.
  • represented the vowels and, or the consonant ~, which was denoted sporadically across manuscripts by either,,,, or '.
  • was normally used to represent, predating the letter.
  • only appeared in a few texts due to Old High German influence.

Literature

Only a few texts survive, predominantly baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest of Charlemagne. The only literary texts preserved are Heliand and fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis. There is also:
  • Beda homily Credo → Old Saxon baptismal vow.
  • Essener Heberegister
  • Old Saxon Baptismal Vow
  • Penitentiary
  • Trierer Blutsegen Spurihalz
  • ''Wurmsegen''

Text sample

A poetic version of the Lord's Prayer in the form of the traditional Germanic alliterative verse is given in Old Saxon below as it appears in the Heliand.

General

  • Euler, Wolfram. Das Westgermanische – von der Herausbildung im 3. bis zur Aufgliederung im 7. Jahrhundert – Analyse und Rekonstruktion. 244 p., in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013,.
  • Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann. The Development of Old English – A Linguistic History of English, vol. II, 632p.. Oxford.
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Lexicons

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External history

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