Development of Germanic Verse Form

by Winfred P. Lehmann

217 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1971

About the author

Winfred P. Lehmann, historical linguist, served as the director of the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1938 and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1941. He began teaching at UT-Austin in 1949 and has been professor emeritus since 1986.
An important contribution was his Proto-Indo-European Syntax, the first and one of the few existing treatments of Proto-Indo-European syntax in a generative framework.

In 1979 he published an updated version of Schleicher's fable together with Ladislav Zgusta.

Reviews

[Joseph Leake]

Some of the content is by now dated (or merely par for the course); but the really outstanding and interesting part to me is the question of the relationship between poetry and language, and (more particularly in this book's case) the question of how linguistic developments, changes to phonetic patterns, affect poetic form and diction. (Or interact with them in some more complicated manner.) I have more reading I want to do on this, both as a general subject and as concerns the old Germanic dialects in particular.

Also, Lehmann's brief foray into what "Proto-Germanic" verse might have been like, based on what we can surmise about that language's morphology and phonology, was fascinating—I want more.