LOW ALEMANNIC DIALECT FEATURES IN ALSATIAN MANUSCRIPTS OF THE 15TH-16TH CENTURIES: CONSTANTNESS AND VARIANCE
Abstract
The article investigates the question of correspondence between constant characteristics of Low Alemannic written dialect and graphemic-phonetic variants caused by the influence of the supradialectical tradition of Early New High German (ENHG, “Gemeines Deutsch”). The scrutiny of the written praxis of local monastic scriptoria is necessary for solving practical tasks of linguistic dating and localization of medieval manuscripts. The present study is based on a vernacular prayer collection in MS Nem. I.O.87 (The National Library of Russia) consisting of 17 heterogeneous blocks from Alsace written during a long period of time from the first third of the 15th till the end of the 16th century, presumably in one of the dominican convents in Strasbourg. In comparison with the blocks of the 15th century, there are some features in the language of female scribes working in the late 16th century, which are characteristic for the German common usage. At the same time, the distribution of Bavarian and East Central features in the Low Alemannic manuscripts is obviously uneven and, most likely, depends on the individual strategy chosen by a scribe. The carried-out analysis has allowed to reveal a number of constant features of the Low Alemannic written dialect (for example, absence of the ENHG diphthongisation) and less constant features subject to a variation (for example, the lowering shift from ou to au). On the contrary, some language features of separate parts of the manuscript should be explained by the strong influence of local dialects (for example, free alternation of rounded and unrounded variants of short high and mid-low vowels: i, e ~ ü, ö). In general, the observed kind of variation indicates that the language of Alsatian prayer books remained conservative for all the 16th century, and the full transition to the common German prestandard still hadn’t taken place in monastic manuscript sources.
Keywords:
Early New High German, Low Alemannic written dialect, Alsace, prayer books, constant dialectal features
Downloads
References
Издания текстов
Cловари
Литература
References
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Условия передачи авторских прав на статьи и рецензии, опубликованные в ежегодном периодическом издании «Немецкая филология» регулируются условиями Лицензионного Договора автора с Санкт-Петербургским государственным университетом. В соответствии с Лицензионным Договором опубликованные материалы находятся в открытом доступе, а авторам бесплатно предоставляется неограниченные возможности их распространения и самостоятельного архивирования.