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A Concise History of the German Language
Cheryl January In this paper, I will review the history of the German language from its earliest origins to the present. I will identify causes of language change such as migration, trade, war, cultural contact, and so forth. As this is a concise history of this language, I will not cover any topic in much depth, but rather give an overview of the many events and stages that have given us what we call today, German. At some point during the disintegration of the Indo-European community, a group of tribes headed to north west Europe, to the area around the western Baltic. While there, they developed a Bronze Age culture. Their migration was probably coming to an end ca. 2000 BC In time, the I.E. dialect spoken by the settlers was replaced by Primitive Germanic (P.G.), the ancestor of all Germanic languages. Primitieve .German. (P.G.) cannot be called a language exactly. It is instead, a group of closely related dialects that are mutually intelligible. From the point in time onward in which we know P.G., it is already considerably disturbed. There was a great expansion of the tribes in all directions. The dialects of tribes that were once neighbors became more and more different as they moved further away from each other. New dialects were formed as tribes became isolated or joined together in new alliances. Tribes that reached the borders of Spain and Italy eventually saw the effects of romantic languages on their dialect. The changes that distinguished P.G. from the old I.E. dialects are as follows:
Chambers and Wilkie, p. 18 The first sound shift is the most important sound change to happen to the Germanic dialects. It was the changed that distinguished the Germanic branch from the rest of the I.E. family. This sound change later came to be known as Grimms Law, mainly because the Grimm brothers were the first to be able to write the laws and its exceptions in a clear and concise manner. A simplified version of Grimms law follows:
McMahon p.23 There are several exceptions to Grimms law. But the Grimm brothers were able to figure out these exceptions and write them in rule form. A Danish scholar named Karl Verner also worked on figuring out these exceptions. It is not known how long these changes took to complete, except to know that not all were completed before the German languages separated from each other. It is estimated that the First Sound Shift was completed by ca. 500 BC We only know this because the Germanic peoples first made contact with the Romans in about the first century BC and none of the words borrowed from Latin are affected by it. From the period around the birth of Christ five great confederations of Germanic tribes may be discerned (on archeological rather than linguistic evidence: the North Germani (later Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians) in Scandinavia, the East Germani (mostly Goths, Vandals and Burgundians) between the Oder and the Vistula, the North Sea Germani (Frisians, Angles, and Saxons) on the north sea coast, the Weser-Rhine Germani (chiefly Franks) between the Weser and the lower Rhine, and the Elbe Germani (including Alemanni, Bavarians, and Lombards) on the lower and middle Elbe (Chambers and Wilkie p. 20). It is not necessary to follow what happened to these tribes in great detail. Through the course of time, mostly in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, several tribes disappeared, some gave over into Romance languages, and some became parts of various other groups of people who spoke different languages entirely. Chamber and Wilkie explain, "The Viking Raids, the settlement of Iceland, and the Norman conquest of Sicily and England were the last episodes in this movement of the Germanic peoples. (Chamber and Wilkie p. 20) The force that emerged to stabilize the Germanic people was the Frankish Empire. With Clovis as their king, the Frankish people drew, under their dominion, all the Germanic people across Europe together either by conquest or by peaceful means. Only the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxon Britain remained free. The first continuous text that is found in any Germanic language is the translation of the Bible into Gothic by Bishop Ulfilas (311-383). It is the only substantial record or an east German dialect. English texts first appear in the late seventh and eighth centuries. German texts do not begin until ca. AD 770 and they become much more numerous by the ninth century. Lockwood explains, There was certainly not much written German before the ninth century and even then and during succeeding centuries output remained relatively low. [In this period] German lived almost exclusively as a spoken medium. Lockwood (p.11). Some time before the ninth century, areas in the German region experienced a series of changes in the plosive consonants known as the Second or High German Sound Shift. This sound change provides a convenient way to classify the then current dialects. Saxon and Franconian, which were unaffected, form the low German group. The rest form High German. This sound change is the main feature that differentiates the High German dialect from the other Germanic languages. It started in the south and spread northward. It also provides a way to distinguish the High German dialects from each other. Some people think that it may have some connection to the First Sound Shift because the same consonants are involved, but its causes are obscure. Many and complicated changes took place, and I could not find a chart that showed the changes succinctly enough to bother with it. Suffice it to say that a large change took place at this period of time. As with any language, the history of German is one of continuous and gradual change. But for practical purposes, the history of German has been divided into four period: Old High German (ca. 770 1050), Middle High German (ca. 1050 1350), Early New High German (ca. 1350 1650), and New High German (ca. 1650 present). The main changes in Middle High German from OHG are in vocabulary and vowels. Accented vowels were reduced, even to the point of vanishing. This led to the collapse of a system of inflections that was in existence and to the emergence of the patterns used for modern declension and conjugation. The other contrast is that a literary dialect was developed and it enjoyed more popularity and usage than any other single dialect. This literary language was used most by the socially elite. At the time of the Early New High German period, a colonizing effort begun by Charlemagne was greatly increasing the German speaking area, and the courtly society was declining. With the loss of societies elite, a need arose for a language that could handle the niceties of the new government and still be understood by numerous people. Early New High German was developed to meet this need. New High German is the language that is spoken in Germany today. It has had to survive and endure many changes to be here, but it is alive, vibrant and will definitely continue to adapt to the needs, whims, and trends of its people. Bibliography Chambers, W. Walker and Wilkie, John R., A Short History of the German Language, Methuen and Co Ltd, London, 1970. Lockwood, W. B., An Informal History of the German Language, W. Heffer and Sons, Cambridge, 1965. McMahon, April M. S., Understanding Language Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. |