Paris Conversations


The Paris Conversations, Pariser Gespräche, or Altdeutsche Gespräche are an eleventh-century phrasebook for Romance-speakers needing to communicate in spoken German. The text takes its name from the modern location of the sole surviving manuscript: according to Herbert Penzl, the text survives in the margins of a tenth-century manuscript of unrelated texts, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 7641. The language is a colloquial north-western dialect of German, providing valuable evidence for everyday spoken German.
While in some ways a practical text useful to a cleric or aristocrat traveling in the German-speaking world, the text is also humorous, containing insults and envisaging scenarios like skipping church services to have sex.

Sample text

An example of the text, giving the German, then the Latin, and then a modern English translation, runs as follows:
Gimer min ros.
Gimer min schelt.

Gimer min spera.

Gimer min suarda.

Gimer min ansco.

Gimer min stap.

Gimer min matzer.

Gimer cherize.

Editions

  • Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, III, 473-513.
  • E. Steinmeyer and E. Sievers, , V, 517-24.
  • W. Braune-E.A. Ebbinghaus, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, pp. 8-11.

  • Studies

  • W. Haubrichs, "," Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 101.1, pp. 86-103.
  • F. Jolles, "The Hazards of Travel in Medieval Germany," German Life and Letters, 21, 309-19.
  • R. Schützeichel, "Das westfränkische Problem," in Deutsche Wortforschung in europäischen Bezügen, pp. 469-523
  • Kershaw, Paul, "Laughter After Babel’s Fall: Misunderstanding and Miscommunication in the Ninth-century West," in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Guy Halsall, pp. 179–202.