Old High German

• 1. Introduction

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  Old High German is the earliest stage of the German language, covering a span from roughly 500 or 750 to 1050. Before a single unified tongue existed, before any standard spelling or grammar had taken hold, dozens of distinct tribal dialects were spoken across what is now central Europe. What made them recognizably related was a single defining event: a sweeping change to their consonants, called the Second Sound Shift, that cut these dialects apart from every other Germanic language on the continent.

  The question this raises is not merely linguistic. How did a scattered collection of tribal tongues survive long enough to become a language at all? The answer runs through monasteries, conquests, epic poetry, and a chain of scholars whose work shaped the very sounds that German speakers use today.

• 2. The Second Sound Shift

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  The Second Sound Shift, known in English as the High German Consonant Shift, may have begun as early as the 6th century. By 750 it was complete, and it had permanently separated the dialects of the southern and central Germanic territories from those of the north.

  The shift worked by transforming inherited voiceless plosives into fricatives and affricates. Where English kept the old consonants, the High German dialects changed them. A sound like the "p" in Old English "slǣpan" became something closer to the "ff" heard in the Old High German equivalent. Word-initially, the same consonants affricatized: Old English "tam" maps onto Old High German forms with a "ts" sound at the start.

  Not every dialect was affected equally. The spread of one particular change, the shift of /k/ to an affricate sound, was geographically very limited and is not reflected in Modern Standard German at all. The uneven application of the shift across territories is one reason why a single unified "High German" phonological system is so difficult to reconstruct.

  The shift also had a social border built into it. North of a line running roughly along the Meuse and Moselle rivers, the Franks retained their language but were untouched by the consonant shift. That boundary between the shifted and unshifted dialects became the boundary between what would later be called High German and Low Franconian, the ancestor of Dutch.

• 3. Charlemagne and the Dialects

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  At the start of the Old High German period, the dialect zones mapped almost exactly onto independent tribal kingdoms. The Alemannic polity was conquered by Clovis I in 496. By the last twenty years of the 8th century, Charlemagne had subdued the Saxons, the Frisians, the Bavarians, and the Lombards, bringing every continental Germanic-speaking people under Frankish rule.

  Charlemagne's conquests created a political unity that the language never quite matched. The administrative language of his empire was Latin, not any form of German. The Church, too, conducted its business in Latin. With no political or institutional pressure toward a common tongue, the individual dialects simply kept their own identities. There was no supra-regional variety of Old High German, and no standardized form ever emerged.

  Even so, the emperor took a personal interest in German literature. The scholar Einhard records that Charlemagne ordered the collection of the old Germanic epic lays for posterity. The fate of that collection reveals how fragile this early literature was. Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious, destroyed his father's gathered epics on the grounds that their content was pagan. What survives from that tradition amounts to fewer than 200 lines in total, split between the Hildebrandslied and the Muspilli.

  In the south, the Lombards who had settled in Northern Italy maintained their own dialect until Charlemagne conquered their kingdom in 774. After that point, the Germanic-speaking population there shifted gradually to the Romance language of the native population, and Langobardic had died out by the end of the Old High German period.

• 4. Monasteries and Manuscripts

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  Every surviving Old High German text was composed in a monastic scriptorium. The monks who wrote them were trained primarily as Latin scribes, and German writing was almost incidental to their main work.

  The origins of this written tradition lie in the establishment of the German church by Saint Boniface in the mid-8th century. The Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century then provided fresh encouragement. The great centers of Old High German literacy were St. Gallen, Reichenau Island, and Fulda, and the dialects that survive in manuscripts are essentially the dialects of those monasteries, a fact that has led scholars to call them Klosterdialekte, or monastery dialects.

  The earliest Old High German text is generally taken to be the Abrogans, a Latin-Old High German glossary dated variously between 750 and 780, probably from Reichenau. The 8th century Merseburg Incantations stand as the only remnant of pre-Christian German literature. The Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunn Prayer appear in manuscripts of the early 9th century, though both are assumed to derive from earlier copies. Even the secular Hildebrandslied survived only because a scribe wrote it on spare sheets inside a religious codex.

  Rabanus Maurus, a student of Alcuin who later became an abbot at Fulda, was among the most influential advocates for German literacy during this period. Two of his students, Walafrid Strabo and Otfrid of Weissenburg, became significant figures in their own right. Otfrid of Weissenburg composed the Evangelienbuch, a Gospel harmony, and in one of its prefaces he reflected directly on the challenge of writing German in the Latin alphabet, noting that spelling is difficult because of what he called the piling up of letters or their unfamiliar sound.

• 5. Grammar in Flux

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  Old High German inherited a complex synthetic grammar from its ancestral Germanic forms, meaning that nouns, adjectives, and verbs carried elaborate sets of endings that signaled their grammatical role. By the end of the period, those endings were beginning to erode.

  The trigger was phonological. By the mid-11th century, the many different vowel sounds that had appeared in unstressed syllables had almost all collapsed into a single reduced vowel. Where Old High German had distinct endings that distinguished cases and genders clearly, Middle High German would rely increasingly on word order and articles to do the same work. The definite article developed from the old demonstrative pronoun forms der, diu, and daz, and the numeral ein, meaning one, gradually took on the role of indefinite article.

  Verbs followed a parallel path of elaboration. Germanic had inherited only a two-tense system, covering present and preterite. Old High German developed three new periphrastic tenses by combining auxiliary verbs with past participles. The Tatian, a 9th century translation of a Gospel harmony produced at the monastery of Fulda, gives a clear example: "phīgboum habeta sum giflanzotan," meaning "there was a fig tree that some man had planted." Initially the past participle in such constructions still behaved as an adjective, taking case and gender endings; only later did it come to be seen as part of the verb itself.

  For the future tense, Old High German used the auxiliary skulan, the ancestor of Modern German sollen, alongside the infinitive, as in a line from Otfrid's Evangelienbuch: "Thu scalt beran einan alawaltenden," meaning "You shall bear an almighty one."

• 6. Writing the Unwritten

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  Adapting the Latin alphabet to German sounds was not a trivial task. Old High German marked the end of a long shift away from the runic writing that had characterized the pre-OHG period, and individual scribes had to invent their own spelling conventions for sounds that Latin simply did not have.

  Notker Labeo, who worked at St. Gallen toward the end of the Old High German period, developed a systematic orthography and is counted among the greatest stylists the language produced. His death in 1022 was followed by what historians call a hundred-year dearth of continuous texts, a gap that marks the transition to Middle High German as clearly as any sound change.

  The dialects also presented a peculiar documentary problem. Because evidence comes only from manuscripts produced at a handful of ecclesiastical centers, scholars have no isogloss data of the kind used to draw modern dialect maps. Two dialects in particular are barely attested: Thuringian survives in only four runic inscriptions and some possible glosses, while Langobardic left behind little beyond personal names and isolated words embedded in Latin texts, plus a few runic inscriptions. Some scholars exclude Langobardic from Old High German altogether because of how little of it remains.

  The Tatian translation, produced at Fulda around 830, became a reference point for Old High German grammars and dictionaries partly by accident: because its East Franconian dialect spellings happen to resemble Middle High German forms closely, they have served as a practical substitute for a standardized spelling that never actually existed.