Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache

Function word erosion which is not a frequency effect: On exemplars and prosodic paradigm levelling

“…When Verner (1875) advanced his revolutionary explanation for exceptions to the first Germanic consonant shift, the main rival account, due to Scherer (1868) was one based on none other than token frequency. In a less-celebrated, but significant part of the paper Verner soberly reviews the frequency-based account and shows that a dataset more representative than Scherer's fails to support it.…”

Revising the History of Germanic Languages: The Concept of <i>Germance</i>

“…From that point on, the linguistic diversity among the Germanic peoples also begins to intensify, so that we can say that this phase of their history compares to the Romance period, which is why one advocates here denominating the Germanic of that time Germance, by analogy to Romance. 1 The Germance period begins, therefore, with the great wave of invasions and incursions carried out by Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire (especially during the 4 th and 5 th centuries) and it lasts until the beginning of the literary tradition of Germanic languages, which corresponds to the emergence of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) in the 8 th century and Old High German in the 8 th -9 th centuries, among others [14,15].…”

Signs of the Times: Medieval Punctuation, Diplomatic Encoding and Rendition

“…As a matter of fact, there have been dierent proposals for a denition of its periodization (see, for instance, Grimm 1822, Scherer 1878, and Wells 1990, but what is relevant here is that the ENHG phase covers a long time span, going through Gutenberg's media revolution, which had a huge impact on the written German language (Bosco Coletsos 2003, 187-91). This stage of the German language is extremely diverse, which has quite a few consequences for the scholarly editor approaching the texts written or printed during the period.…”