What is Old High German?

Old High German diutisc
Spoken in:	southern Germany (south of the Benrath line), parts of Austria and Switzerland, Southern Bohemia, Sporadic communities in Eastern Gaul
Language extinction:	developed into Middle High German from the 11th century
Language family:	Germanic   West Germanic    Old High German
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	goh
ISO 639-3:	goh

The term Old High German (OHG, German: Althochdeutsch, german abbr. Ahd.) refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason. There are, however, a number of Elder Futhark inscriptions dating to the 6th century (notably the Pforzen buckle), as well as single words and many names found in Latin texts predating the 8th century.

Characteristics

The main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects from which it developed is that it underwent the Second Sound Shift or High German consonant shift. This is generally dated very approximately to the late 5th and early 6th centuries - hence dating the start of OHG to around 500. The result of this sound change is that the consonant system of German remains different from all other West Germanic languages, including English and Low German. Grammatically, however, Old High German remained very similar to Old English, Old Dutch and Old Saxon.

By the mid 11th century the many different vowels found in unstressed syllables had all been reduced to 'e'. Since these vowels were part of the grammatical endings in the nouns and verbs, their loss led to radical simplification of the inflectional grammar of German. For these reasons, 1050 is seen as the start of the Middle High German period, though in fact there are almost no texts in German for the next hundred years.

Examples of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables:

Old High German	Middle High German	English
machôn	machen	to make, to do
taga	tage	days
demu	dem(e)	to the

(The Modern German forms of these words are broadly the same as in Middle High German.)

Dialects

There was no standard or supra-regional variety of Old High German - every text is written in a particular dialect, or in some cases a mixture of dialects. Broadly speaking, the main dialect divisions of Old High German seem to have been similar to those of later periods - they are based on established territorial groupings and the effects of the Second Sound Shift, which have remained influential until the present day. But because the direct evidence for Old High German consists solely of manuscripts produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based. For this reason the OHG dialects may be termed monastery dialects.

The main OHG dialects, with their bishoprics and monasteries:

• Central German
• Middle Franconian: Trier, Echternach, Cologne
• Rhine Franconian: Lorsch, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt
• South Rhine Franconian: Weissenburg im Elsaß
• East Franconian: Fulda, Bamberg, Würzburg
• Thuringian: (no texts)
• West Franconian: conjectural dialect of the Franks in Northern Gaul
• Upper German
• Alemannic: Murbach, Reichenau, Sankt Gallen. Strasbourg
• Bavarian: Freising, Passau, Regensburg, Augsburg, Ebersberg, Wessobrunn, Tegernsee, Salzburg, Mondsee
• Langobardic: (fragmentary, classification as OHG uncertain)

There are some important differences between the geographical spread of the Old High German dialects and that of Modern German:

• no German dialects were spoken east of the Rivers Elbe and Saale - in the OHG period this area was occupied by Slavic peoples since the Völkerwanderung and was not settled by German speakers until the late 10th and the early 11th century
• the Langobardic dialect of the Lombards who invaded Northern Italy in the 6th century is assumed to have been an Upper German dialect, though little evidence of it remains apart from names and individual words in Latin texts, and a few inscriptions

Frankish

The Franks conquered Northern Gaul as far south as the Loire; the linguistic boundary later stabilised approximately along the course of the Maas and Moselle, with Frankish speakers further west being romanised. However Frankish is a special case among the old West Germanic languages, the Frankish tribes build their empire at the same time as the High German consonant shift took place. This meant that the dialects of Frankish in the North of their Empire, the Low Countries, did not shift while the dialects in the South did. The dialects in the south are part of Old High German, the ones in the North are part of Old Dutch.

With Charlemagne's defeat of the Lombards in 776, nearly all continental Germanic speaking peoples had been incorporated into the Frankish Empire. Thus also bringing all continental West Germanic speakers under Frankish rule. However, since the language of both the administration and the Church was Latin, this unification did not lead to any development of a supra-regional variety of Frankish.

Phonology

The charts show the vowel and consonant systems of the East Franconian dialect in the 9th century. This is the dialect of the monastery of Fulda, and specifically of the Old High German Tatian. Dictionaries and grammars of OHG often use the spellings of the Tatian as a substitute for genuine standardised spellings, and these have the advantage of being recognizably close to the Middle High German forms of words, particularly with respect to the consonants.

Vowels

Short & Long Vowels

OHG had corresponding sets of 5 short and 5 long vowels, which could occur in both stressed and unstressed syllables.

	front		central		back
	short	long	short	long	short	long
close	i	iː			u	uː
mid	e	eː			o	oː
open			a	aː

Notes:

1. It seems likely that all back vowels had front allophones as a result of Umlaut, which were then phonemicized in MHG. There was also a mid-close [e] resulting from the Umlaut of /a/ and /e/.
2. It is probable that the short high and mid vowels are lower than their long equivalents, as in Modern German, but this is impossible to establish from the written sources.
3. Towards the end of the period, short vowels and then long vowels tended to be replaced, when in unstressed syllables, by <e> spellings, which may have represented [ɛ] or schwa [ə].

Diphthongs

OHG diphthongs are indicated by the spellings: <ei>, <ie>, <io>, <iu>, <ou>, <uo>.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal/Velar	Glottal
Plosive	p  b			t  d		k <k, c>, g
Affricates	p͡f			ts <z>
Nasal	m			n		ŋ <ng>
Fricative		f v <f, v>	θ <th>	s  z		x <h, ch>	h
Approximant	w <uu>				j <i>
Liquid				r  l

1. There is wide variation in the consonant systems of the OHG dialects arising mainly from the differing extent to which they are affected by the High German Sound Shift. Precise information about the articulation of consonants is impossible to establish.
2. In the plosive and fricative series, where there are two consonants in a cell, the first is fortis the second lenis. The voicing of lenis consonants varied between dialects.
3. OHG has long consonants, and the following double consonant spellings indicate not vowel length as in Modern German orthography, but rather genuine double consonants: pp, bb, tt, dd, ck (for /kk/), gg, ff, ss, hh, zz, mm, nn, ll, rr.
4. /θ/ changes to /d/ in all dialects during the 9th century. The status in the OHG Tatian (c. 830), reflected in modern OHG dictionaries and glossaries, is that <th> is found in initial position, <d> in other positions.
5. It is not clear whether the distribution of palatal and velar allophones /c ~ k/ and /ç ~ x/(before front and back vowels, respectively) found in Modern German was already present in OHG.

Texts

Further information: Medieval German literature

The early part of the period saw considerable missionary activity, and by 800 the whole of the Frankish Empire had, in principle, been Christianised. All the manuscripts which contain Old High German texts were written in ecclesiastical scriptoria by scribes whose main task was writing in Latin rather than German. Consequently, the majority of Old High German texts are religious in nature and show strong influence of ecclesiastical Latin on the vocabulary. In fact, most surviving prose texts are translations of Latin originals. Even secular works such as the Hildebrandslied are often preserved only because they were written on spare sheets in religious codices.

The earliest OHG text is generally taken to be the Abrogans, a Latin-Old High German glossary variously dated between 750 and 780, probably from Reichenau. The 8th century Merseburg Incantations are the only remnant of pre-Christian German literature. The earliest texts not dependent on Latin originals would seem to be the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunn Prayer, both recorded in manuscripts of the early 9th Century, though the texts are assumed to derive from earlier copies.

The Bavarian Muspilli is the sole survivor of what must have been a vast oral tradition. Other important works are the Evangelienbuch (Gospel harmony) of Otfried von Weissenburg, the short but splendid Ludwigslied and the 9th century Georgslied. The boundary to Early Middle High German (from ca. 1050) is not clear-cut. The most impressive example of EMHG literature is the Annolied.

Samples

The Lord's Prayer in three OHG dialects. Because these are translations of a liturgical text, they are best not regarded as examples of idiomatic language, but they do show dialect variation very clearly.

Alemannic, 8th Century	South Rhine Franconian, 9th Century	East Franconian, c. 830
The St Gall Paternoster	Weissenburg Catechism	OHG Tatian
Fater unseer, thu pist in himile, uuihi namun dinan, qhueme rihhi diin, uuerde uuillo diin, so in himile sosa in erdu. prooth unseer emezzihic kip uns hiutu, oblaz uns sculdi unsero, so uuir oblazem uns skuldikem, enti ni unsih firleiti in khorunka, uzzer losi unsih fona ubile.	Fater unsēr, thu in himilom bist, giuuīhit sī namo thīn. quaeme rīchi thīn. uuerdhe uuilleo thīn, sama sō in himile endi in erthu. Brooth unseraz emezzīgaz gib uns hiutu. endi farlāz uns sculdhi unsero, sama sō uuir farlāzzēm scolōm unserēm. endi ni gileidi unsih in costunga. auh arlōsi unsih fona ubile.	Fater unser, thū thār bist in himile, sī geheilagōt thīn namo, queme thīn rīhhi, sī thīn uuillo, sō her in himile ist, sō sī her in erdu, unsar brōt tagalīhhaz gib uns hiutu, inti furlāz uns unsara sculdi sō uuir furlāzemēs unsarēn sculdīgōn, inti ni gileitēst unsih in costunga, ūzouh arlōsi unsih fon ubile.

Source: Braune/Ebbinghaus, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 17th edn (Niemeyer, 1994)

See also

• Middle High German
• Medieval German Literature

External links

• Chronological list of the main Old High German texts
• Joseph Wright, An Old High German Primer - complete text of 1906 work
• A Brief Collection of Old High German
• Althochdeutsche Texte im Internet (8.–10. Jahrhundert) - links to a range of online texts
• Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch des 8. Jh. - OHG dictionary, based on 8th century texts.
• Modern English-Old High German dictionary
• LiTLiNks: althochdeutsche Texte - comprehensive listing of OHG texts with links to online versions.

Sources

• Althochdeutches Lesebuch, ed. W.Braune, K.Helm, E.A.Ebbinghaus, 17th edn, Tübingen 1994. ISBN 3-484-10707-3
• J. Knight Bostock, A Handbook on Old High German Literature, 2nd edn, revised by K.C.King and D.R.McLintock, Oxford 1976. ISBN 0-19-815392-9
• R.E.Keller, The German Language, London 1978. ISBN 0-571-11159-9
• Lexikon der Germanistischen Linguistik, ed. Hans Peter Althaus, Helmut Henne, Herbert Ernst Weigand, 2nd revised edition, Tübingen 1980. ISBN 3-484-10396-5
• S.Sonderegger, Althochdeutsche Sprache und Literatur, de Gruyter 1974 ISBN 3-11-004559-1
• C.J.Wells, German. A Linguistic History to 1945, Oxford 1987. ISBN 0-19-815809-2