35.2913, Books: How to create an early German scriptus: Somers (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2913. Sat Oct 19 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2913, Books: How to create an early German scriptus: Somers (2024)

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Date: 17-Oct-2024
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [sebastian.nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: How to create an early German scriptus: Somers (2024)


Title: How to create an early German scriptus
Subtitle: The literization approach to historical German syntax
Series Title: Open Germanic Linguistics
Publication Year: 2024
Publisher: Language Science Press
                http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/460

Author: Katerina Somers
eBook: ISBN: 978-3-96110-487-1 Pages: 272 Price: Europe EURO 0
Abstract:

This book presents a new methodology for the study of historical
varieties, particularly a language’s early history. Using the German
language’s first attestations as a case study, it offers an
alternative to structuralist approaches to historical syntax, with
their emphasis on delineating the shapes and mechanisms of early
grammars. This focus has prompted Germanists to treat the data from
the eighth- and ninth-century corpus with suspicion in that its texts
are either poetic or translational. That is, if the unquestioned
object of inquiry is a historical cognitive grammar, one ought to
isolate – and perhaps discount entirely – data that are the product of
confounding factors, like a poetic meter or a Latin source text.
Otherwise, these competence-obscuring examples risk undermining
scholars’ understanding of a genuine early German grammar.

Rather than this “deficit approach,” the current volume proposes that
scholars treat each early attestation as an artifact of
“literization,” the process through which people transform their
exclusively oral varieties into a written variety. Each historical
text features a scriptus, that is, an ad hoc, idiosyncratic, and
localized literization created by a person (or team of people) for a
particular purpose. The challenge of understanding texts in this way
lies in the fact that there is little to no direct evidence pointing
to the specific identities of early medieval literizers, their
motivations, and the nature of the multiple spoken competencies that
fed into their scripti.

In order to conceptualize early medieval German and the syntactic
variation it exhibits as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, this book
details the linguistic resources that were available to the literizer
and are, happily, accessible to the modern researcher. First, there is
Latin. Though illiterate in their own multilectal vernacular in the
sense that no German scriptus existed until they developed it,
literizers were educated in this highly literized language and the
classical metalinguistic discourse, known as grammatica, that was
associated with it. Second, there are the linguistic patterns of
elaborated orality, that is, the varieties that are characteristic of
public life and the oral tradition in exclusively oral communities.
Though the patterns of a peculiarly German elaborated orality are lost
to history, those of other traditions and cultures are attested and
should also inform how scholars conceive of a multilectal early
German.

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Subject Language(s): German (deu)

Language Family(ies): German

Written In: English (eng)



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