A Short History of the German Language (RLE Linguistics E: Indo-European Linguistics)

William Walker Chambers, John Ritchie Wilkie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317918523
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This simple introduction to the history of the German language seeks to provide students who have some knowledge of modern German, but no knowledge either of its development or of linguistic theories, with a short account of the essential factors – chronological, geographical and linguistic – and their interrelation.

The material is arranged in three parts. The first traces the history of the German language from its origins in Indo-European through the pre-documentary Germanic period and the Middle Ages to the present day. In the second part the development of the German vocabulary is described, including word formation, borrowing, and change in meaning; and the book concludes with a section on changes in sounds, grammatical forms, and syntax. Emphasis is placed on the development of the standard literary language in its historical and social context, while such topics as dialects and the relationship of German to other Germanic and European languages are treated very briefly as the need arises.

The inclusion of maps, some specimen passages of German its early stages, suggestions for further reading after each chapter, and an extensive classified bibliography also contribute to making this a useful introduction to the subject and a reliable foundation for more advanced work.

Part I

Chapter 1

Language and language study

Man has been described as ‘the talking animal’, and language is one of the most pervasive elements in human life. Whether thought is possible without language is a question best left to philosophers and psychologists; but it is clear that in general our thoughts and feelings are given a measure of objectivity and permanence by being expressed in words. Social life, too, from the simplest personal contacts to the complex activities of nations, is unthinkable without language as a means of communication; indeed society could not have begun to develop at all if men had not been able, by means of language, to share their thoughts, to influence their neighbours’ behaviour, and to transmit the heritage of experience. We no longer believe, as our remote ancestors did, that language in itself has magic properties; but anyone who has been moved by a great poet or novelist or stirred by a skilful actor or orator or preacher will need no further proof that language is a powerful instrument for good or ill in human affairs. The student of language can hardly be in doubt about either the interest or the value of his subject; at every turn he is involved in all the variety and complexity of human life and history.

But how did language begin? It is a reasonable assumption that the origin of language is in some way associated with the emergence of homo sapiens as a separate species. But in what circumstances and why did primitive man first begin to speak? What were the first human ‘words’ like? What were the early steps by which human language developed? Such questions have been asked at least since the days of Plato and the writers of the stories of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel in Genesis; since the eighteenth century (since, for example, Herder’s essay of 1772, Über den Ursprung der Sprache) interest in them has been continuous. But neither comparative philology nor the observation of the language of early childhood, neither the analysis of the language of modern primitive societies nor the study of primitive man and the anthropoid apes has so far yielded more than a number of ingenious – but conflicting – theories. Such questions will no doubt continue to fascinate and tantalize us; but lack of evidence for a confident and convincing answer may well leave them for ever in the realm of pure speculation.¹

In any case many linguists regard questions of the origin and early development of language as belonging to the fields of psychology, philosophy, and anthropology rather than to that of linguistics. They prefer to concentrate on those periods of language for which there is documentary evidence, either on modern languages and dialects, which can be observed directly and recorded on disc or tape, or on languages of earlier periods – languages now extinct or the older stages of extant languages – for which written documents have survived. This brings us to a much later date. For while man began to emerge between 250,000 and 500,000 years before the Christian era and homo sapiens was fully developed soon after 20,000 B.C., the earliest extant documents go back no farther than about 3000 B.C. These are texts in the Sumerian language (once spoken in the region between the Persian Gulf and Babylon), written on clay tablets in a cuneiform script (i.e. a script composed of wedge-shaped strokes). These are followed by texts in other languages as different communities reach a certain stage of civilization and invent or, more usually, borrow and adapt an alphabet. With this material linguists since the early nineteenth century have been able to construct an ever more complex picture of the world’s languages and their development.

But they have also succeeded in penetrating into the pre-documentary period of language. By comparing the earliest extant forms of a large number of languages they have not only established relationships between languages which seem at first sight quite unrelated, but have reconstructed some of the features of undocumented languages from which the extant languages are descended. This has been done most successfully, as we shall see, for the so-called Indo-European group of languages, to which most European languages, including English and German, belong. But here two points must be stressed. In the first place, such reconstructions are only partial; the sound system is reasonably certain, grammatical forms and vocabulary are much more doubtful, while in the field of syntax we seem unable to say anything very reliable at all. Despite the confidence of August Schleicher, who in 1868 published a fable in ‘Indo-European’, such a ‘reconstructed’ language is more akin to a skeleton than to a living organism. In the second place such reconstructions take us only a little way back – a few thousand years, perhaps – beyond the documents; they cast little light on the origins of human speech, which are separated from us by several hundred thousand years. At one time it was thought that it might be possible to compare the parent Indo-European language with the parent languages of other groups – Semitic, Polynesian, African, Chinese – and so to reconstruct the original human language, the Ursprache. It was widely believed that civilization and, with it, language, being such astonishing and unique phenomena, could only have arisen and developed from one place. But the other view seems at least as probable, namely that if language arose at one place it could just as easily have arisen at different places where conditions were roughly similar. At any rate the idea of a single original language is now much less widely held; and there seems little hope of penetrating to the origins of human language by such comparative philological methods.

But what is language, we may now ask, and how does it function? Language is a means of communication between minds and consists essentially of sounds (or groups of sounds) associated with ideas. This association seems to be quite arbitrary – apart from a small number of onomatopoeic words in which the linguistic sounds resemble the sound of the object or action named – but once it is established it is very close. When I wish to convey an idea to a listener, the idea in my mind at once evokes the group of sounds associated with it. These I articulate as physical sounds, which are received by the listener’s ear. Finally the sound-group evokes the associated idea in his mind. This represents in a much over-simplified form the essential process of communication by language.

So far we have spoken of ‘language’ in a general sense. But a distinction must now be drawn between ‘language’ in a more restricted sense and ‘speech’. Speech is a human activity, the individual act of speaking – or a series of such acts – a psycho-physical activity of the kind just described, without permanence but constantly renewed every time a person speaks. Language, on the other hand, is the whole elaborate system of ‘sound-idea’ associations. It is more than individual, being possessed by the whole community which speaks the language in question. Yet it is not an independent entity, for it exists only in the minds of the individual members of the community. It is upon this store of established ‘sound-idea’ associations that the individual speaker draws in his act of speech, momentarily turning some small part of this passive, latent ‘language’ into active, concrete ‘speech’. Language in this sense is a powerful social force. It binds a community together – for only through these established ‘sound-idea’ associations is communication possible on any large scale. By giving a certain permanence to the experiences and attitudes of the community it moulds the thinking and outlook of each new generation which learns it.

Language can be studied in two main ways, sometimes known as the synchronic or descriptive and the diachronic or historical methods.¹ The first aims at studying a language as it exists at a certain historical period, without concern for its development before or after that period. Such studies have shown that a language is not a mere jumble of ‘sound-idea’ associations, but a coherent system, an organic structure in which all the parts are complementary to each other. Yet it is not a fixed, immutable structure; on the contrary, it changes in small ways all the time. And any change in one part of the system brings changes in other parts. As some parts cease to function well – as, for example, ambiguity and obscurity creep in – other parts are adapted or created anew to do the work of the defective parts. In this respect a language is like a living body, where organs can adapt themselves to function in place of other diseased or missing organs. Most of these adjustments take place gradually and below the level of consciousness; only comparatively rarely do grammarians and linguists deliberately attempt to ‘repair’ and improve the language.

The aim of the historical method is to describe these changes in language and, if possible, to find their causes. The language may be studied in isolation, without reference to its human context; and this has been useful to establish the facts of change. It is more usual today, however, to study the history of a language along with the history of the community which speaks it, indeed in some sense as a record of that community’s varying fortunes. For the causes of linguistic change seldom lie in the language itself, but rather in its human speakers. Linguistic changes, in fact, seem to begin with some individual who, for one reason or another, seeks to convey his meaning by a new association of sounds and ideas. If this innovation is imitated by other members of the community it ceases to be a mere personal idiosyncrasy and becomes itself an established part of the language. The reasons for any particular change, however, are not always clear. While it is often easy, for example, to account for the appearance of new words in the vocabulary, the reasons for apparently spontaneous changes in the sound system are often much more obscure.

So far we have treated languages in isolation. But in practice a language is related to a number – often a very large number – of other languages, and indeed in two ways. A number of languages may have developed from a common parent language; these are then said to be related genealogically. Or communities, living close together or separated by great distances, may have some connections, cultural, religious, political, social, or commercial, with each other. Their languages are said to be related culturally. We shall find examples of both these relationships in the history of German.

A short introductory book like the present one may give the impression that the history of the German language presents no further problems. In fact almost all the theories about the history of German which were once so confidently held have been questioned; over large areas of the field there is as yet no agreement. We shall be happy if some readers at least find in the following chapters a stimulus to investigate a few of the many problems which still await solution.

For Further Reading

Simeon Potter, Modern linguistics, 2nd edn., 1967

Mario A. Pei, The story of language, 2nd edn., 1966

Walter Porzig, Das Wunder der Sprache: Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse der modernen Sprachwissenschaft, 1950

Margaret Schlauch, Language and the study of languages today, 1967

Mario A. Pei and Frank Gaynor, A dictionary of linguistics, 1954

On phonetics:

David Abercrombie, Elements of general phonetics, 1967

Bertil F. H. Malmberg, Phonetics, 1963

Jethro Bithell, German pronunciation and phonology, 1952

Carl and Peter Martens, Phonetik der deutschen Sprache: praktische Aussprachelehre, 1961

Theodor Siebs, Deutsche Hochsprache, Bühnenaussprache, 18th edn., by Helmut de Boor and Paul Diels, 1961

Der große Duden: Aussprachewörterbuch, 1962

On the origins of language:

Arthur S. Diamond, The history and origin of language, 1959

Alexander Jóhannesson, Origin of language: four essays, 1949

Géza Révész, The origins and prehistory of language, 1956

Richard A. Wilson, The miraculous birth of language, 1937

Bernhard Rosenkranz, Der Ursprung der Sprache: ein linguistisch-anthropologischer Versuch, 1961

¹ For books on the origin of language see p. 8.

² For introductions to the study of language see p. 7.

Chapter 2

Indo-European

The history of the German language begins, strictly speaking, with the appearance of the first written documents in the eighth century A.D. But German does not exist in isolation; it has close connections with other languages. In particular it shares with most European languages and some Asiatic ones a common origin in a language usually known among German scholars as Indo-Germanic and outside Germany as Indo-European. This ancient prehistoric language is, of course, entirely undocumented, but by comparing the oldest extant forms of its more important descendants nineteenth-century scholars were able to reconstruct some of its essential features.

Indo-European had a wide range of vowels,¹ ten monophthongs a, e, i, o, and u, both short and long, as well as a neutral vowel (sometimes called a ‘schwa-vowel’) noted as 9 and pronounced like the unaccented final e in Ger. Glaube.² In addition six short diphthongs ai, ei, oi, au, eu, ou, were matched by six long ones āi, ēi, ōi, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page1
• Copyright Page1
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendics
• Appendix I Development of strong verb classes
• Appendix II Specimen passages of German
• Appendix III Bibliography
• Index
• Index