Urgermanisch *þe-na-z ‘Gefolgsmann’

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-299
Author(s):  
Stefan Zimmer
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
Old Saxon

Proto-Germanic *þe-na-z (Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse) is traditionally understood as ‘child, follower, servant’, connected with Greek teknon ‘child’, both from *tek- ‘to beget’.This is unfounded; the meaning ‘child’ is unattested, the traditional etymology highly improbable. Proto-Germanic *þe-na-z is from *tek- ‘to stretch out one's hand, touch, receive’, designating basically ‘follower, retainer’, thus a technical term of Germanic Gefolgschaftswesen. Pertinent textual passages, the theory of Germanic heathen baptism, and the rites whereby a warrior is accepted into a lord's retinue are crucial for the analysis.

Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early Germanic Languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-357
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Agee
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Germanic Languages

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

scholarly journals Metrical Positions and their Linguistic Realisations in Old Germanic Metres: A Typological Overview

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seiichi Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Common Scale ◽  
The Common ◽  
Linguistic Alignment ◽  
The One ◽  
Linguistic Material

This paper provides a typological account of Old Germanic metre by investigating its parametric variations that largely determine the metrical identities of the Old English Beowulf, the Old Saxon Heliand, and Old Norse eddic poetry (composed in fornyrðislag, málaháttr, or ljóðaháttr). The primary parameters to be explored here are the principle of four metrical positions per verse and the differing ways in which these constituent positions are aligned to linguistic material. On the one hand, the four-position principle works with a maximal strictness in Beowulf, and to a slightly lesser extent in fornyrðislag, whereas it allows for a wider range of deviations in verse size in the Heliand and ljóðaháttr. In málaháttr, however, the principle in itself gives way to the five-position counterpart. On the other hand, the variation in the metrical– linguistic alignment in the three close cognate metres may be generalised by positing the common scale, Heliand > Beowulf > fornyrðislag, for the decreasing likelihood of resolution, the increasing likelihood of suspending resolution, and the decreasing size of the drop.

scholarly journals Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan E. Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Poetic Style

The Formation of Old High German diorna, Old Saxon thiorna, Gothic widuwairna, and Old English niwerne

1942 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
Fritz Mezger
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Old Saxon

Old Frisian

Diachronica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Laura Catharine Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic languages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle English, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebunga (Boutkan & Siebunga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are available as text editions”1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). This has left a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Frisian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps.

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