Semantica ed etimologia dell’armeno hnjan ‘vasca in cui si preme l’uva’

The article deals with the Armenian substantive hnjan, which in the modern language denotes the ‘wine-press’ or a ‘rural hut located on the fields’. An exam of its use in the texts of classical age where it is attested (the translation of the Bible and the History of Armenians of Agathangelos) allows to recognize an original meaning of ‘hole dug for the squeezing and the fermentation of the grapes’. The etymology proposed connects the word with Sanskrit paṅka- ‘mud, mire, dirt, clay; ointment; moral impurity’, and a German cognate represented by Old High German fūhti, fūht, Anglo-Saxon fūht ‘damp, moist’, the German source of the Romance loanwords Italian, fango, French fange, Catalan fanc ‘mud, mire’.

On the Grammaticality of Poetry: The Asyndetic Verb-Late Clause in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch

This article discusses asyndetic verb-late clauses in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, which has long been considered a problematic text within the Old High German corpus in part because of clauses like these. Clauses with a dependent clause’s verbal syntax and no complementizer have been characterized as ungrammatical and/or rare (Behaghel 1932, Schrodt 2004, Axel 2007) and thus have not been included in accounts of early German syntax. I argue that asyndetic verb-late clauses are grammatical and that they can function as main or dependent clauses. Crucially, they demonstrate that main verb fronting was not obligatory in 9th-century German. Although Otfrid marked the main-subordinate asymmetry by various grammatical means, including verbal syntax, I demonstrate that verbal prosody also influenced syntax: Heavy verbs are more frequent in clause-late or -initial position and light verbs in clause-second position, regardless of the main–dependent distinction. I suggest that prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax is characteristic of Otfrid’s exclusively oral vernacular. In contrast, Otfrid imports the concept of differentiating main and dependent clauses grammatically from Latin. The Evangelienbuch, then, represents an attempt to transform an oral vernacular into a written language by imposing, however imperfectly, the norm of grammatically distinct main and dependent clauses onto a prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax.*

Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early 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.

On the habitual verb pflegen in German. Its use, origin, and development

In this article, I examine the distributional properties, emergence conditions, and development of the habitual verbal head pflegen ‘use(d) to’ in the history of German. Synchronically, I argue that Present-day German possesses subject to subject raising verbs and that they can all be brought down to a common denominator: They allow promotion of the embedded subject into the matrix subject position (= A-movement). However, at the same time I argue that German subject to subject raising verbs differ and that their heterogeneity follows from their semantics. What all this boils down to is that German subject to subject raising verbs do not form a uniform class, neither semantically nor syntactically. As for pflegen, I account for its syntactic peculiarities referring to its functional status, i.e., the status of being a habitual head. Diachronically, I show that pflegen grammaticalized into an AspHAB-head in the transition from Old High German (750–1050) to Middle High German (1050–1350) and that this grammaticalization process restricted the way it behaves in Present-day German.

The Concept of Distributivity In Old High German and Middle High German Texts

Quantification and numbers, numerals and number words have been in the focus of research on different levels of linguistical studies. The mathematical thinking and understanding of primitive arithmetical manipulations have been covered from both the mathematical and psychological points of view. The concept of distribution developed from the ability to group objects and belongs to the second wave of the mathematical understanding of primitive people. Being one of the first concepts developed in the human consciousness it stayed un-nominalised until the development of the number consequence paradigm. The distributive constructs existing in the Modern German language are a result of development from the Proto Indo European through the Proto Germanic, Old High German, and Middle High German languages. However, the modern standard concept of distributivity is built on the preceding word – i.e., a number of colloquial variations keep being used in some German dialects.

The submerged genitive in Old Prussian

This paper is devoted to the Old Prussian phrase ʃwaiāʃmu ʃupʃei buttan ‘to his own house’ (Enchiridion, III 876). Far from being simply the result of a syntactic error, the genitive ʃupʃei ‘of oneself’ can be recognized as the reflex of an archaic syntactic pattern, the “submerged genitive”, which has left numerous traces in Baltic and other Indo-European languages (Slavic, Greek, Latin, Old High German).

The Training and Disciplinary Identity of Linguists in Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century

In the mid-19th century, the great centers of philological and linguistic study in Europe were a handful of German universities that led the way in organizing doctoral training. In seminars guided by a senior professor, students presented papers on specialized topics and had them critiqued and queried. This chapter takes a close look at the nature of such training in Germany and France through the experience of one Leipzig doctoral student who went on to lecture in Paris and Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The political and cultural relations between Germany and France in the two decades following the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine colored and complicated the importation of the Germany doctoral training model in the various branches of the University of Paris, and not least in the section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in which Saussure was hired to lecture on Gothic and Old High German, to a student body made up disproportionately of displaced Alsatians. So significant was Saussure’s impact on the institution that his teaching set the agenda for French doctoral training in linguistics and adjacent areas at least through the 1960s, and indeed across Europe and beyond – this despite the fact that he was never in a position to direct a single doctoral thesis himself. The chapter considers as well how the disciplinary identity of linguistics came to be formed in this period, and how it went on to develop over the ensuing decades.

Bemerkungen zu Gl. 2,703,40 ‹sichinzUGU› und weiteren, auch neugefundenen Glossen in Paris, BnF lat. 9344

In the dictionaries of Old High German an entry snichezzunga f. ‘sob’ is listed. It is shown here that the manuscript reading rather points to sichizunga that has a parallel in OE sicettung f. ‘sigh, sob’ and is a derivation from the root PGmc. *sei̯ke/a- ‘to sigh, sob’. In a supplement, improved readings of five glosses in the manuscript Paris, BnF lat. 9344, are given, as well as an edition of four new glosses and some reflections on a still unexplained marginal entry.

Ahd. slecko m. ‚Schnecke‘

Under the forms listed for the lemma Old High German snecko m. ‚snail‘ also a variant ‹ slecco › is mentioned. The ‑l‑ must then be the result either of a scribal error, a dissimilation or an assimilation. However, there is in Dutch a word for snail that also shows ‑l‑, Middle Dutch slecke (f.). It is argued here that Old High German slecko is a separate lemma that corresponds to Middle Dutch slecke.

«Würzburg mark description» as an early monument of the Old High German language

The article concerns the issues of discussion about the composition of the monuments of ancient German writing that are relevant to the history of the German literary language of the initial period, in particular the texts of agrarian law of the 8th century descriptions of land detours and demarcations of the Main Franconian region. The thesis of the clerical exclusivity of ancient German writing dominates by inertia in Russian historical Germanic studies. The relevance of the research carried out on the material of the unique monument of the so-called second description of the Wrzburg mark is associated with the approbation of an integrated approach to the analysis of the language and genre and stylistic affiliation of the text. The place of this source in the corpus of autochthonous texts of the VIII century from Wrzburg is determined. The research solves the problem of decoding the semiotic meanings contained in this old-written text, which is identified as a protocol for oral presentation. The main research methods are onomastic and component analysis (toponyms, anthroponyms), a toolkit of historical-stylistic, discursive and hermeneutic approaches using digital technologies. The genre content and linguistic characteristics of the monument are specified. The description of the Wrzburg demarcation and related texts is considered in the context of the linguistic situation of the VIIIXI centuries. The main conclusions of the study: as a small-format legal text, this monument has a special semantic nature, encodes valuable historical and cultural information, unique relics of the transitional early feudal era in Germany; its reference (referential) function, areаlogy, toponymic and anthroponymic semiotics are revealed through intertextual connections with other Old High German monuments of the XVIII century.