The Scripting of the Germanic Languages. A comparative study of “spelling difficulties” in Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon, written by Annina Seiler

2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-147
Author(s):  
Yasushi Kawasaki
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Old English ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Germanic Languages

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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Distribution of Word Classes in Old English and Old High German: a Preliminary Contrastive Study Based on „The Battle of Maldon”, „Hildebrandslied” and „Ludwigslied”

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Anna Kamińska
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Comparable Corpora ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
The Battle Of Maldon ◽  
Quantitative Basis ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper presents an example of a historical study based on comparable corpora. It aims to analyse and compare the distribution of different parts of speech in Old English and Old High German, thus providing a quantitative basis for further conclusions concerning different patterns of the development of those two West-Germanic languages. A particular attention has been devoted to the frequencies of prepositions and pronouns, as there are considerable differences between the languages in this respect. In addition, the article is a an attempt to show the importance and relevance of computational data for contrastive historical linguistics and their role in supporting or disproving traditional theories.

Meta-Tatian

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-134
Author(s):  
Elliott Evans
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Traditional School ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Case Number ◽  
Attributive Adjectives

AbstractIn addition to inflecting adjectives for case, number, and gender, the early Germanic languages inflect adjectives as either strong or weak. Scholarly consensus is lacking regarding what triggers this fourth inflectional category, i.e. why an adjective surfaces as either strong or weak. While the traditional school of thought held that weak adjectives surface with definite determiners, some recent scholarship has argued that a semantic force such as definiteness or classification is responsible. To evaluate the two positions, I compared attributive adjectives in the Old High German translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron with the corresponding passages in Gothic and Old English. The conclusion supports the traditional school of thought that determiners trigger weak adjectives and refutes the idea that semantics is primarily responsible for whether an adjective surfaces as strong or weak.

Indo-European and common Germanic roots of the preterito-presentia verbs

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
А. В. Боцман ◽  
І. М. Моренець
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Language Group ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Language Family ◽  
European Language ◽  
Main Attention ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Historical Approach

The article addresses the Indo-European and common Germanic roots of the preterito-presentia verbs. The words of the ancient Indian, Greek, Latin, Old Slavonic, Lithuanian, Gothic, Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old English languages are analysed within the framework of the comparative-historical approach. The analysis is carried out on the phonological, morphological and semantic levels. The main attention is paid to the discovery of common latent archaic roots that were obscured in the process of historical development and the separation of the Germanic language group from the rest of the Indo-European language family.

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