Matt’s Reviews > A History of German > Status Update

[New High German] words like List and Gewalt have shifted from masculine/feminine to exclusively masculine, reflecting the semantic field of ‘knowledge/skill’ or ‘power’ which correlates with feminine. Kot shifts from masculine/neuter to simply masculine, in line with tendency for the semantic field ‘waste’ to show masculine gender.

Exception: Scheiße (feminine)

   Jungfernzwinger

[C]areful work can chart patterns of structural and social variation [in Early New High German] because we have enough written material surviving. We often find new features first adopted by women rather than men, and by lower middle class rather than upper or lower class speakers, for instance.

The morphological and syntactic structures of German are regularly in closer correspondence with their associated semantic representations than those of English. English tolerates greater collapsing of distinct meanings into common surface forms (whence greater ambiguity and vagueness)....

(Quote from John Hawkins A comparative typology of English and German)

[…] standard German today includes both monophthongization and diphthongization—we say Haus not Hus and Bruder not Bruoder. But neither change is found across anything like the whole German-speaking territory. Nor are they found in a particularly large number of cities, nor are they found in the areas identified today with the ‘best’ German, like Hannover.

er nehabet irgezen   daz  uuir stuppe birn
he not-has forgotten that we   dust   are

'he hasn't forgotten that we are dust'

A few more months and I'll be able to speak OHG. I'll only need a time-machine to take me back to the 9th century.

Dialect variation is so pervasive and complex in [Old High German] that specialists often say that each text has its own grammar, which is not much of an exaggeration.

Old High German mocking Romance-language speakers:

Tole sint Uualhâ, spâhe sint Peigira,
luzic ist spâhi in Uualhum,
mêra hapênt tolaheiti denne spâhi.

Too hard? Here’s the translation into Latin:

Stulti sunt Romani, sapienti sunt Paioari,
modica est sapienta in Romana,
plus habent stultitia quam sapienta.

In an experiment on myself, triggered by a footnote on p.5, I realize that I pronounce König as [ˈkøːnɪç] (the usual way) when I talk about kings of flesh and blood, but [ˈkøːnɪk] when I talk about the chess piece; königlich I always pronounce [ˈkøːnɪklɪç]. Strange.