Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Howard Jones ◽  
Martin H. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Object Of Study

This chapter explains the organization of the book and defines the object of study. Different pathways are recommended depending on readers’ prior knowledge of Middle High German and their linguistic, literary, or historical interests. The Introduction makes a distinction between Middle High German writings in general and Classical Middle High German, i.e. the normalized language in which many great works of the period are edited (reflecting nineteenth-century practices) and read today. Middle High German is situated within the Germanic language family and contrasted with Middle Low German, and its main dialect areas are described. The Introduction explains why the period 1050–1350, which is traditionally used to define Middle High German, has been adopted in this volume, and gives an account of the chronological subdivisions of the period. The methodological approach of the remaining chapters of the book is set out and recommendations are made for further reading.

sagitta volante – philere vligend: A hitherto undiscovered fragment of an interlinear Latin-German Psalms translation at the Schwerin State Library sagitta volante – philere vligend: Ein unbekanntes Fragment einer interlinearen lateinisch-deutschen Psalmenübersetzung in der Landesbibliothek Schwerin

2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-225
Author(s):  
Anette Löffler
Keyword(s):  
Middle High German ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
State Library

A fragment containing a Latin-German Psalter Text was uncovered at the Schwerin State Library while examining a recovered binder's waste. These Psalms emerge from the Septuagint tradition. The fragment dates to the last quarter of the 13 th century. The translated text is composed in Middle Low German and Middle High German. Bei der Erschließung der mittelalterlichen Makulatur wurde in der Landesbibliothek Schwerin ein Fragment mit einer lateinisch-deutschen Psalmenübersetzung gefunden. Die Psalmen orientieren sich an der Überlieferung der Septuaginta. Das Fragment stammt aus dem letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts. Die Schreibsprache ist mitteldeutsch/niederdeutsch.

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.

scholarly journals Dlaczego Bałtowie i Słowianie liczyli pokrewieństwo w kolanach, czyli o etymologii słow. kolěno ‘kolano; ród’ i lit. kẽlis ‘kolano; ród’

LingVaria ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 251-264
Author(s):  
Norbert Ostrowski
Keyword(s):  
Knee Joint ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Semantic Relationship ◽  
Low German ◽  
Primary Meaning ◽  
Middle Low German

WHY DID BALTS AND SLAVS COUNT KINSHIP IN KNEES, OR THE ETYMOLOGY OF SLAV. kolěno ‘KNEE; TRIBE’ AND LITH. kẽlis ‘KNEE; TRIBE’ OCS. kolěno ‘knee; tribe, generation’ (cf. Polish pokolenie ‘generation’) and Lith. kẽlis ‘knee; joint in a plant; tribe; degree of kinship’ come from old adjectives with possessive suffixes (-ěn- in Slavic and -ija- in Baltic). Their primary meaning was ‘a joint in the body’ (*‘a rotating part of the body’). Both were formed from nouns with the meaning ‘wheel’ (OCS. kolo, kolese ‘wheel’, Old Prussian kelan ‘wheel’, Latvian duceles ‘chaise’; IDE. *kwelh1- ‘to turn, to rotate’). The hypothesis proposed in this paper explains the semantic relationship between Slav. kolěno ‘knee; tribe, generation’ and Proto-Slav. *kel-nŭ- > *čelnŭ- > Slovenian člèn // Serbo-Croatian člȃn ‘joint; ankle, talus’. Assuming that the meaning ‘joint’ was the original one, OCS. kolěno ‘tribe, generation’ and Lith. kẽlis ‘degree in relationship; tribe’ can be interpreted as old terms of customary law in the field of succession. The counting of kinship by enumeration of body parts from the head to the middle fingernail has been preserved in Middle Low German customary law, so-called “Sachsenspiegel”. The hypothesis is supported by numerous parallels: Lith. sąnarys ‘a joint in the body; (OLith.) ‘generation’, Lith. stráipsnis ‘body part; (OLith.) generation’, OPr. streipstan ‘body part; generation’, Middle High German Gelied ‘body part; generation’, and Middle Low German lede ‘a joint in the body; body part; degree of kinship’.

scholarly journals On the (non-)expletive uses of the preverbal negative ne/en in the history of (Low) German and Dutch

Nordlyd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-191
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Witzenhausen
Keyword(s):  
Middle High German ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Middle Dutch ◽  
Low German ◽  
Complement Clauses ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle Low German

This article presents novel data from Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch showing that two phenomena which often have been treated as one, namely the single former negativemarker ne/en appearing in adverbial and complement clauses, have to be treated as distinct phenomena. I argue that only in complement clauses, ne/en is a paratactic negation marker, while in adverbial clausesit functions as an exceptive and adversative discourse marker. In these contexts, I refer to ne/en as post-cyclical Furthermore, I propose a scenario as to how the reanalysis from negation to exceptive markerproceeded.

scholarly journals Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Farasyn ◽  
Anne Breitbarth
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
North West ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

AbstractIn spite of growing interest in recent years, the syntax of Middle Low German (MLG) remains an extremely underresearched area. In light of recent research showing early North West Germanic languages to be partial null subject languages (Axel 2005; Walkden 2014; Kinn 2016; Volodina/Weiß 2016), the question arises where MLG is positioned in this respect. The present article presents novel data showing that MLG had referential null subjects (RNS) and can be classified as a partial null subject language. Based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of their syntactic distribution, we argue that two types of RNS must be distinguished in MLG, null topics in SpecCP and null clitics on C.

scholarly journals Von Negation zu Domänensubtraktion

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Witzenhausen
Keyword(s):  
Stage I ◽  
Stage Ii ◽  
Stage Iii ◽  
Universal Quantifier ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Low German ◽  
Sentential Negation ◽  
Middle Low German

Abstract Middle Low German (MLG) underwent Jespersen’s Cycle, a change in the expression of sentential negation, whereby a preverbal marker ni (stage I) was adjoined by an adverbial niht (stage II) in the transition towards MLG, and was eventually replaced by it (stage III). In this article, I argue that the single preverbal particle ne/en in MLG became a marker of negation which is located syntactically higher, i. e. above the clause boundary, than the clause in which ne/en appears. This analysis is based on a corpus study investigating MLG exceptive clauses (English unless-clauses). Both on semantic and syntactic grounds, it is shown that these clauses can be explained as being complements of an operator that subtracts the proposition in the exceptive clause from the modal domain of a universal quantifier.

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