New perspectives on the language contact between Middle Low German and mainland Scandinavian in the late Middle Ages, and about a footnote on mixed languages which gave rise to a ‘detective story’

Multilingua ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERNST HÅKON JAHR
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Low German ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Mixed Languages

Reynke Vosz de olde (Rostock, 1539) in context of the Middle Low German Reynke de Vos tradition in the 15th–16th century

Reinardus ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 174-197
Author(s):  
Sabina Tsapaeva
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Northern Germany ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Low German ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Middle Low German

The present article discusses the beast epic Reynke Vosz de olde (Rostock, 1539) in context of the Middle Low German Reynke de Vos tradition in the 15th–16th century. Emphasis falls on the comparison of the two particularly important Middle Low German editions of the widely-known epic against the socio-historical background in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages. This paper proposes to make a contribution to the field of research of the Middle Low German Reynke de Vos tradition in general but primarily examines the printed Reynke Vosz de olde edition from 1539. For this latter purpose the Reynke Vosz de olde text is compared with the 1498 pretext from the Poppy Printer, the Mohnkopf printing house, in a number of respects: typography and illustrations, construction of the book, division in books and chapters, versification, different tendencies in the commentary parts etc. The 1539 Reynke Vosz de olde edition is filtered for tendencies in textual innovations and structural changes as distinct to prototype text as well as motivation and intention cues for those. Further questions like the importance of the quotation analysis of the marginal gloss notes and of the critical question on the glossator’s identity will be highlighted and discussed.

Language Contact in Celtic and Early Irish

2020 ◽  
pp. 330-349
Author(s):  
Raymond Hickey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Family ◽  
European Language ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
External Interface ◽  
Textual Records

There is little doubt that the early stages of the subgroups of the Indo-European language family involved extensive contact. The movements of early groups of speakers across large stretches of land in Euroasia meant that these people came into contact with others who spoke genetically unrelated languages. This contact is responsible for the non Indo-European lexis in Indo-European languages and may also be the source of non-inherited grammatical features. Establishing the precise source of such lexis and grammar is a daunting task, given the great time-depth involved and the dearth of textual records that could provide helpful data for reconstructing the sources of borrowings external to this language family. But there was also contact within the orbit of the Indo-European languages when members of different subgroups came into close geographical proximity with each other due to repeated migrations. This fact accounts for borrowings across Indo-European subgroups (e.g. from Celtic into Germanic). This chapter examines cases of contact and probable borrowing both within the Indo-European language family and at its external interface to languages from other families, inasmuch as this can be established with reasonable certainty. The focus for this treatment is on early stages both of Celtic and of the Irish language as one of the main members of this group. The consideration of contact effects in Irish is limited to the language as it developed up to the late Middle Ages.

scholarly journals THEFT IN THE CODICES PICTURATI OF THE SACHSENSPIEGEL

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Händl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
German Language ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
The Relationship

My research is focused on the characteristics of the crime of theft and its punishment in Eike von Repgowʼs Sachsenspiegel, which was written between 1220 and 1235 in the Middle Low German language. The relationship between the text and images in the four codices picturati of this legal text will be examined in the context of some passages directly related to theft and its punishment to demonstrate that the illustrations in these manuscripts can contribute to a better understanding of legal institutions in the German Middle Ages.

scholarly journals On case loss and svarabhakti vowels: the sociolinguistic typology and geolinguistics of simplification in North Germanic

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Tam T. Blaxter ◽  
Peter Trudgill
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Low German ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle Low German

AbstractWork in sociolinguistic typology and creole studies has established the theory that intensive language contact involving second language acquisition by adults tends to lead to grammatical simplification. This theory is built on many anecdotal case studies, including developments in the history of Continental North Germanic associated with contact with Middle Low German. In this paper, we assess the theory by examining two changes in the history of Norwegian: the loss of coda /Cr/ clusters and the loss of prepositional genitives. If the theory is correct, these changes should have been innovated in centers of contact with Middle Low German. We find that both changes in fact spread into southeastern Norwegian from Swedish. Since contact with Low German also took place in Sweden and Denmark, this is consistent with the theory. It opens questions for future research about the role of dialect contact in simplificatory change in North Germanic.

"De Seekarte Ost Vnd West To Segelen ...": On Northern European Nautical "Fachliteratur" in the Late Middle Ages

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-118
Author(s):  
Irmtraud Rosler
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Low German ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Needed Information ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Characteristic Features

AbstractThe requirements of navigation in Western and Northern Europe led to the production of handbooks that did not have any obvious precursors in the learned traditions. The paper describes the characteristic features of such navigational handbooks and discusses their production, distribution, and reception. The peculiarities of transmission of nautical knowledge are also reflected linguistically: from the beginning, practical navigational texts were written in vernacular languages, that is, in Dutch, French, English, or Low German, but not in Latin. They were not conceived as texts for learned men. Instead, as is shown by the example of the Low German Seebuch, one of the oldest such manuscripts, they were planned as practical manuals for navigators who needed information about matters such as depths, currents, distances, and routes.

Sprachkontakte des portugiesischen im Spätmittelalter und ihre Auswirkungen auf das Anredesystem

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 241-260
Author(s):  
Aurelia Merlan
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Address Forms ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
The Middle Ages

Language Contact of Portuguese During the Late Middle Ages and Its Effect on the Portuguese System of Address Forms. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, various noun phrases for reverential address (like Vossa Mercê) appear in Portuguese and enter into competition with the pronoun vos, finally leading to a restructuring of the system of address forms. Regarding these noun phrases, the present article tries to determine to which degree their appearance may be explained by linguistic contact between Portuguese and Spanish/Italian. For that purpose, the article describes, in the first part, the nature and intensity of these contacts. The second part analyses the reverential noun phrases in three 15th century chronicles which contain (some of) the oldest documented cases of this new strategy of address.

Early Changes of Dental Fricatives: English and Frisian Compared

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 243-267
Author(s):  
Stephen Laker
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
The Middle Ages

Dental fricatives [θ ð] develop along similar lines in English and Frisian throughout most of the Middle Ages. The consonants were retained in about equal measure, but alterations occurred when next to other consonants. A way of explaining the changes in both languages is by invoking complexity of articulation, a notion that finds empirical support. The parallel developments of English and Frisian undermine the idea that Old English evolved differently from other Old Germanic languages during its earliest stages. However, from the late fourteenth century, Frisian took on a different trajectory of change due to new social circumstances connected with increased language contact and bilingualism, especially with Dutch and Low German.

scholarly journals A note on the relationship between Scandinavian and Low German

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Ivar Berg
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Low German ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractRecent work on language contact between Scandinavian and Low German during the Middle Ages widely assumes that the varieties were linguistically close enough to permit some kind of receptive multilingualism, and hence an example of dialect contact. Two arguments that have been invoked in support of this scenario are the lack of (1) meta-linguistic comments on flawed understanding, and (2) attested bilingualism. However, towards the end of the most intense contact period, in the early sixteenth century, there is indeed meta-linguistic information in the preserved sources suggesting that intelligibility was restricted. Furthermore, there are also examples of code-switching and active bilingualism indicating that the varieties were clearly perceived as distinct languages. This paper presents such examples from Norwegian primary sources that have not been observed in recent scholarship. Based on this evidence, it is argued that the relationship between the languages by the early sixteenth century was asymmetric, Scandinavians being able to understand Low German more often than vice versa.

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