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.

A Transcript of Submission: Jesus as Fated Victim of Divine Violence in the Old Saxon Heliand

The Heliand, written shortly after the conquest and conversion of the Saxons at the hands of Charlemagne, maintains a vexed place in the study of medieval European Christianity(ies). Some argue that the Heliand’s overarching intent was pastoral, meant to ease the fears and calm the rage of the defeated Saxons, while others posit that the Heliand reflects a “dissident gospel,” aimed at subverting the official theological outlook of the Carolingian empire. This study argues that while both theories capture something of the Heliand’s ingenious contextual impact, they underestimate one of its key themes: the role of wurd (fate) and its co-identification with the “power of God,” which drives Jesus to the cross and scaffolds his submission to the violence of the divine will. Thus, the Heliand presents compliant victimization as the proper “fate” of those who submit to God’s purposes, promising a heavenly reward and countermanding the Saxon ethos of resistance.

Sal-Frankish NUM-NUM Compounding in the Lex Salica

This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds to the Roman numeral D, being half of M ‘1000’. With this analysis, the Sal-Frankish numbers become transparent, even the two higher values of the so-called chunnas. The neologism sunde was a back formation from tusunde ‘thousand’, which was analysed as tu ‘two’ + sunde ‘500’. This back formation was possible in the contact language Sal-Frankish for both segmental reasons (ongoing occlusion of [θ] to [t]) and stress, but not in Old Low Franconian, Old Middle Franconian, Old Saxon or OHG.

Die frühe voraltsächsische und voraltfriesische Runenüberlieferung

This paper deals with two runic inscriptions that are highly relevant to language history. 1. The runic sequences on the three Weser rune bones, which date to the first half of the 5th century, are not entirely clear. However, West Germanic (Pre-Old Saxon) linguistic features such as gemination by j (kunni ‘kin, clan’) and loss of -a < *-az (hari ‘army’) are obvious. By far the most interesting linguistic form is the preterite deda ‘did’ that reflects PGmc. *-dai (cf. PNorse talgi-dai ‘carved’ on the Nøvling fibula) as opposed to PGmc. *-dǣ(d) (PNorse -da, OHG -ta etc.). Apparently, we are dealing with two distinct endings, *-dai deriving from an PIE middle in *-(t)ó(i̯). 2. The legend ska 2 nomodu (a 2 = ᚪ) on a solidus of unknown provenance (ca. 600) renders the dithematic anthroponym Skānɔmōdǝ̣ (or *Skānɵmōdǝ̣), presumably the name of the moneyer. It seems that medial o stands for [ɔ] or [ɵ], an allophonic variant of the linking element /a/ before a labial consonant; parallels can be found in Old Germanic naming. Two linguistic features, viz. ā < WGmc. au and the nominative ending -ǝ̣ < WGmc. -a < PGmc. *-az, indicate that the language of the inscription is Pre-Old Frisian.

Visual analytics for historical linguistics: opportunities and challenges

In this paper we present a case study in which Visual Analytic methods for interactive data exploration are applied to the study of historical linguistics. We discuss why diachronic linguistic data poses special challenges for Visual Analytics and show how these are handled in a collaboratively developed web-based tool: HistoBankVis. HistoBankVis allows an immediate and efficient interaction with underlying diachronic data and we go through an investigation of the interplay between case marking and word order in Icelandic and Old Saxon to illustrate its features. We then discuss challenges posed by the lack of annotation standardization across different corpora as well as the problems we encountered with respect to errors, uncertainty and issues of data provenance. Overall we conclude that the integration of Visual Analytics methodology into the study of language change has an immense potential but that the full realization of its potential will depend on whether issues of data interoperability and annotation standards can be resolved.