Into German: The Language of the Earliest German Literature

Summary

THE ORIGINS OF GERMAN LITERATURE lie in the oral tradition of the pre-literary period but the origins of German literacy are to be found in the Latin literary culture of the post-Roman world. Indeed, a division between primarily oral German and primarily written Latin, and essentially regional German contrasting with supra-regional Latin, is a defining feature of German literary and linguistic history from the beginnings of writing in German in the middle of the eighth century to the dawn of the early modern period in the middle of the fourteenth. Yet another three hundred years would elapse before German finally supplanted Latin as the dominant written language in Germany in the 1680s.

At the beginning of the Old High German period (ca. 750–ca. 1050), the Latin context is so pervasive that no text can be fully understood, or even read aloud with any pretence to authenticity, without reference to it. Despite the fact that Old High German and Latin are both Indo-European languages with a large body of cognate vocabulary (for example family terms such as father, brother and mother — Old High German fater, bruoder, muoter are cognate with Latin pater, frater, mater, and so on.), as well as some striking grammatical parallels, Old High German and Latin developed very different phonological systems, so that, although the Latin alphabet was used to write Old High German, some ingenuity is required on the part of modern scholars to reconstruct how the language might have been pronounced.