What does solid spelling reveal about cognition? Evidence from Middle Low German

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of lexically complex graphemic units in Middle Low German – sequences that once occurred written as one word, but from today’s perspective are considered separate linguistic units. Examples are enwolde ‘did not want’ or isset ‘is it’. This phenomenon has received little attention, although it gives direct insight into the word concept of German and its diachronic change. The central question is what favors the perception of multiple words as a unit. Data from the Reference Corpus Middle Low German/Low Rhenish (1200–1650) show that it is mainly function words that occur in lexically complex graphemic units. Moreover, this study shows that besides from prosodic patterns, agreement and government relations reinforce lexical sequences to be perceived as linguistic units.

In Stadt und Stadt: Berlin und Ruhrgebiet im Vergleich

The largest and most important urban centres in Germany, Berlin and the Ruhr metropolitan area, share a very similar socio-historical and linguistic past. The vernaculars spoken in these regions are both High German varieties that have developed on Low German substratum. Thus, both varieties have emerged from a language-shift situation and have preserved a number of Low German features. Moreover, both varieties have lost in prestige during the process of massive immigration during the period of industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century. In such contexts, processes of “dialect levelling” are to be expected. Then as now both the Ruhr area and Berlin are hotspots of urban multilingualism and national and international mobility. This lends both linguistic settings a special dynamics and innovative potential. In the light of these parallels it is promising to compare linguistic structures of these varieties in order to gauge whether similar conditions yield similar linguistic developments. In this paper we investigate two syntactic phenomena which are highly salient both in the Berlin dialect and in Ruhr German. Using corpus data of spoken language we compare frequencies and formal features of (i) preposition-determiner cliticisation, and (ii) split pronominal adverbs in both varieties. As an overall result it can be stated that both phenomena show up more pronouncedly and more straigtforwardly in Ruhr German than in the Berlin dialect; thus it can be surmised that the latter follows the same path as the former, but has not yet reached the “final destination”.

Im Spannungsfeld zwischen hochdeutscher Norm und niederdeutscher Sprachkompetenz

This article contains an edition of a 17th-century Low German letter addressed to the German congregation in Stockholm. Seen against the shift of writing language from Low to High German, this letter is analyzed in respect to code-mixing, which is shown to fulfill a communicative function. Furthermore the author here suggests that the code-mixing observed in the letter can be described as congruent lexicalization, where Low German syntactic structures are filled with both Low and High German lexical material.

Contemplating Law, Film and Mennonites

In this article, I put Carlos Reygadas’ prize-winning art film, Stellet Licht, to use for Law and Film purposes. Stellet Licht (or Silent Light) is the first film made in the medieval German/Prussian dialect, Plautdietsch (or Low German), and filmed in an Old Order (very conservative) Mennonite colony in Mexico. Viewers of Stellet Licht must be prepared to be contemplative because the film often eschews dialogue or action in favour of contemplation. This fictitious film invites us to contemplate a heterosexual love triangle and provides a novel site for thinking about how law and patriarchy can unconsciously work in our lives. When we do the contemplative work invited by the film, we not only see law differently, but we can also imagine miraculous reconciliation between people.

Freedom to Know Me: The Conflict between Identity and Mennonite Culture in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness

In Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004; Giller Prize finalist; winner of Canada's Governor General's Award) Nomi Nickel, a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl from southern Manitoba, Canada, tells the story of her short life before her excommunication from the closed community of the fictional East Village. East Village is based on a real town in southern Manitoba called Steinbach (where Toews was born), where Mennonite culture remains segregated from the rest of the world to protect its distinctive Anabaptist Protestantism and to keep its language, Mennonite Low German or Plattdeutsch, a living language, one which is both linguistically demotic yet ethnically hieratic because of its role in Mennonite faith. Since the Reformation, and more precisely the work of Menno Simons after whom this ethno-religious group was christened, Mennonites have used their particular brand of Low German to separate themselves from the rest of humankind. Toews constructs her novel as a multilingual narrative, to represent the cultural and religious tensions within. Set in the early 1980s, A Complicated Kindness details the events that lead up to Nomi’s excommunication, or shunning; Nomi’s exclusion is partly due to her embracing of the “English” culture through popular, mostly 1970s, music and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Insofar as Toews’s novel presents the conflict between the teenaged narrator and the patriarchal, conservative Mennonite culture, the books stands at the crossroads of negative and positive freedom. Put succinctly, since the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, Mennonites have sought negative freedom, or freedom from persecution, yet its own tenets foreclose on the positive freedom of its individual members. This problem reaches its most intense expression in contemporary Mennonitism, both in Canada and in the EU, for Mennonite culture returns constantly to its founding precepts, even through the passage of time, coupled with diasporic history. Toews presents this conflict between this early modern religious subculture and postmodern liberal democracy through the eyes of a sarcastic, satirical Nomi, who, in this Bildungsroman, must solve the dialectic of her very identity: literally, the negative freedom of No Me or positive freedom of Know Me. As Mennonite writing in Canada is a relatively new phenomenon, about 50 years old, the question for those who call themselves Mennonite writers arises in terms of deciding between new, migrant, separate-group writing and writing as English-speaking Canadians.

THEFT IN THE CODICES PICTURATI OF THE SACHSENSPIEGEL

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.

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

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.

Ein geistlicher Kräutergarten in Lübeck

This article provides an edition and stemmatological analysis of a 15th century Low German version of the medieval German krutgarden text. This Low German krutgarden version has gone unnoticed by general scholarship because the MS containing it resided in Russia until the 1990s.