Questions about German Thread

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Imralu »

Oh, and another question. The word way is always a bit problematic. A way to do something is usually an Art und Weise, a Methode or a Möglichkeit, but what about in these sentences:

"One way we could think about this is to imagine "
"The simplest way to think of this is regard X as Y ..."
"There are two ways to say XYZ, either bla-bla-bli-bla-blu or bla-di-bla-di-bli-bli"


The 'think of' is the hardest part. Looking up synonyms in English like 'conceive of' and 'conceptualise' give konzipieren (and sometimes konzeptualisieren, but the definitions of those seem to be about inventing a concept. How do I express a 'way of thinking about something' which means a rough, simpler approximation of the truth used to help someone understand a concept. What is that in German?

All I can think of is something like Am einfachsten betrachtet man X als Y or X lässt sich am einfachsten als Y betrachten ... but I don't know if betrachten is the best available word, and I still want "way", because what if I want to discuss "another way".

If you don't like this way of thinking of it, another, perhaps less simple way is to imagine X as Z
Wenn Ihnen diese Betrachtensweise nicht gefällt, dann lässt sich X auch ein bisschen weniger einfach als Y betrachten.

Häh?
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Viktor77 »

What is the likelihood that a name in German would contain a <c> instead of a <k>? For example, I have German ancestors from the Rhine with first names Carl and Caspar. Would these be typical names instead of Karl and Kaspar or is it likely they changed them to accommodate English norms?

Also, simply curious if my name Eric Becker could be mistaken for German or would it be more likely Erik Becker?
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Cedh »

Imralu wrote:It's just occurred to me that I don't know how to distinguish between a (web)site and a (web)page in German. It seems like some people use Homepage to mean website and Webseite to mean website or webpage.
I don't think German really makes a distinction between website and webpage. Webseite can definitely mean both. You can specify a subpage as Unterseite, and you can specify a website's home page as Startseite, but there's no single word that can mean "website" (i.e. the whole set of webpages accessible under a certain base url) but not "webpage" (i.e. only one page out of that set), and there's no single word either which can mean "webpage" (i.e. an individual webpage of any level, i.e. the home page or any of its subpages) but not "website".

As for Homepage, I personally only use that for the home page of a website (i.e. synonymous with Startseite), but many people (mostly less tech-savvy ones) use it as a synonym for Webseite, which is a usage that goes back to the late 1990's when many websites still consisted of a single page. For some people, Homepage can be used to mean both "website" and "home page", but not "subpage of a website", but this usage is often considered confusing, to the extent that some web admins in Germany recommend not using the word Homepage at all.
Imralu wrote:Also, when talking about grammar, does anyone know a succinct distinction between

Argument ↔ Ergänzung
Adjunkt ↔ Angabe

They all have separate Wikipedia articles and my head starts to swim in reading them. All I can gather is the two on the left are used by all linguists (corresponding to their cognates in English) and the two on the left are traditionally German words and the concepts differ slightly, although how they differ is not something I can find explained anywhere. The top two are required by the verb and the bottom two are optional.

I was basically looking for one word that would cover both argument and adjunct (in English as well as German), whether required or optional, as this seems like a normal thing to me, basically anything other than the predicate verb phrase, and instead, I found four words that seem to be subtly distinguished.
I don't think there is such a word, at least not as accepted and widely-known terminology. Maybe your best bet would be EN constituent / DE Konstituente, although the meaning of that is not exactly synonymous with what you're looking for.
Imralu wrote:Oh, and another question. The word way is always a bit problematic. A way to do something is usually an Art und Weise, a Methode or a Möglichkeit, but what about in these sentences:

"One way we could think about this is to imagine "
"The simplest way to think of this is regard X as Y ..."
"There are two ways to say XYZ, either bla-bla-bli-bla-blu or bla-di-bla-di-bli-bli"

The 'think of' is the hardest part. Looking up synonyms in English like 'conceive of' and 'conceptualise' give konzipieren (and sometimes konzeptualisieren, but the definitions of those seem to be about inventing a concept. How do I express a 'way of thinking about something' which means a rough, simpler approximation of the truth used to help someone understand a concept. What is that in German?

All I can think of is something like Am einfachsten betrachtet man X als Y or X lässt sich am einfachsten als Y betrachten ... but I don't know if betrachten is the best available word, and I still want "way", because what if I want to discuss "another way".

If you don't like this way of thinking of it, another, perhaps less simple way is to imagine X as Z
Wenn Ihnen diese Betrachtensweise nicht gefällt, dann lässt sich X auch ein bisschen weniger einfach als Y betrachten.

Häh?
Denkweise? Sichtweise? Ansicht? (Denk-)Ansatz? Verständnis? All of these do not mean exactly what you're looking for, but could be translation equivalents in certain situations.
Viktor77 wrote:What is the likelihood that a name in German would contain a <c> instead of a <k>? For example, I have German ancestors from the Rhine with first names Carl and Caspar. Would these be typical names instead of Karl and Kaspar or is it likely they changed them to accommodate English norms?

Also, simply curious if my name Eric Becker could be mistaken for German or would it be more likely Erik Becker?
The spelling variants with initial <c> are mostly based on fashion. They seem to have been more common in earlier centuries, and for me they have a "before-WW2" connotation. They're also associated with a somewhat higher social class than the variants with <k>.

As for your first name, "Eric" is definitely English and not German. "Erik" looks more at home, but it's still quite strongly associated with Scandinavian or at least Northern German origin. The regular German form of the name would be "Erich", which has been out of fashion for children for at least 50 years or so. That said, the most natural form of the name for a native German young man today would probably be "Erik".

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Imralu »

Cedh wrote:
Imralu wrote:It's just occurred to me that I don't know how to distinguish between a (web)site and a (web)page in German. It seems like some people use Homepage to mean website and Webseite to mean website or webpage.
I don't think German really makes a distinction between website and webpage. Webseite can definitely mean both. You can specify a subpage as Unterseite, and you can specify a website's home page as Startseite, but there's no single word that can mean "website" (i.e. the whole set of webpages accessible under a certain base url) but not "webpage" (i.e. only one page out of that set), and there's no single word either which can mean "webpage" (i.e. an individual webpage of any level, i.e. the home page or any of its subpages) but not "website".

As for Homepage, I personally only use that for the home page of a website (i.e. synonymous with Startseite), but many people (mostly less tech-savvy ones) use it as a synonym for Webseite, which is a usage that goes back to the late 1990's when many websites still consisted of a single page. For some people, Homepage can be used to mean both "website" and "home page", but not "subpage of a website", but this usage is often considered confusing, to the extent that some web admins in Germany recommend not using the word Homepage at all.
Thanks! That was basically what I feared. And I'm with you on homepage. I never really hear anyone say it in English except for friends' mums who don't get on the internet very much. I always thought it meant whatever page you have set to be the first thing your browser goes to.

Wait, I'm not even sure about that, because now I can't think what I say in English for Startseite ...
Cedh wrote: I don't think there is such a word, at least not as accepted and widely-known terminology. Maybe your best bet would be EN constituent / DE Konstituente, although the meaning of that is not exactly synonymous with what you're looking for.
Thanks. Constituent will do, I guess, and I have been using that sometimes ... but it includes the predicate. The other thing I've been doing is using argument but making sure I redefine it to mean argument or adjunct. Such a pain. Why is there no word for this? Unprädikat?
Cadh wrote: Denkweise? Sichtweise? Ansicht? (Denk-)Ansatz? Verständnis? All of these do not mean exactly what you're looking for, but could be translation equivalents in certain situations.
Thanks. This will continue to frustrate me though. This is a normal rhetorical thing that I use to help explain something ... and German has these weird gaps. It's like this ... Lass uns kurz ... ähm ... pretenden ... nein. Ok, lass uns uns vorst... FUCK! Stellen wir uns vor: X ist Y. Ein anderer 'Weg, daran zu denken' .. FUCK! Wenn Sie sich nicht vorstellen wollen, dass X Y ist, ist gibt es auch die Möglichkeit X als Z zu betrachten. Guh ... Na gut, X ist Y.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by schyrsivochter »

Imralu wrote:Thanks. This will continue to frustrate me though. This is a normal rhetorical thing that I use to help explain something ... and German has these weird gaps. It's like this ... Lass uns kurz ... ähm ... pretenden ... nein. Ok, lass uns uns vorst... FUCK! Stellen wir uns vor: X ist Y. Ein anderer 'Weg, daran zu denken' .. FUCK! Wenn Sie sich nicht vorstellen wollen, dass X Y ist, ist gibt es auch die Möglichkeit X als Z zu betrachten. Guh ... Na gut, X ist Y.
What about „Stell dir vor, X ist/sei Y. Oder, wenn dir das nicht gefällt, können wir auch X als Z betrachten.“?

(I’m not sure I completely grasped the problem here.)
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

You could try looking into Wittgenstein - he talks (in translation) about 'ways of life', but also in his discussion of seeing vs seeing-as, I have a feeling the translators may have used 'way of seeing' or the like... might be interesting to see what was in the original German...

Although come to think of it, you probably don't have a bilingual wittgenstein immediately to hand, so...

EDIT: oh, right, you wanted specifically 'way of thinking'. Well anyway, turns out W is easy to find online, so here are some "ways" in the PU:
Aber läßt sich denn das Wort »Farbe«, oder »Länge« nur so auffassen? - but is there only one way of taking the word 'colour' or 'length'?

Und wenn statt eines Wegweisers eine geschlossene Kette von Wegweisern stünde, oder Kreidestriche auf dem Boden liefen, - gibt es für sie nur eine Deutung? - and if there were not a single signpost but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground - is there only one way of interpreting them?

Oder, man läßt seine Art des Kopierens gelten und trachtet, ihm die normale Art als eine Abart, Variation, der seinigen beizubringen. - Or perhaps one accepts his way of copying and tries to teach him ours as an offshoot, a variant of his

Ich habe seine Anschauungsweise geandert - I have changed his way of looking at things

Wohl aber, wenn wir uns darüber wundern, wie wir denn die Maschine als Symbol einer Bewegungsweise verwenden können, - da sie sich doch auch ganz anders bewegen kann. - We do talk like that, however, when we are wondering at the way we can use a machine to symbolise a given way of moving - since it can also move in quite different ways.

Dadurch zeigen wir nämlich, daß es eine Auffassung einer Regel gibt, die nicht eine Deutung ist - what this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation

Ich werde einen Andern nicht meine ›Technik‹ lehren können, der Linie zu folgen. Es sei denn, ich lehne ihn eine Art des Hinhorchens, der Rezeptivität. - I shall not be able to teach anyone else my 'technique' of following the line. Unless, indeed, I teach him some way of hearkening, some kind of receptivity.

Wir können seine Art, der Linie zu folgen, von ihm nicht lernen. - we cannot learn his way of following a line from it.

Aber eben dadurch haben wir uns auf eine bestimmte Betrachtungsweise festgelegt - but that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter

Die Frage nach der Art und Möglichkeit der Verifikation eines Satzes ist nur eine besondere Form der Frage »Wie meinst du das?« Die Antwort ist ein Beitrag zur Grammatik des Satzes - Asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a particular way of asking "How d'you mean?" The answer is a contribution to the grammar of the proposition

was der gefunden hatte, war eine neue Sprechweise, ein neuer Vergleich - but what its discoverer really found was a new way of speaking, a new comparison

Du hast vor allem eine neue Auffassung gefunden. So, als hättest du eine neue Malweise erfunden; oder auch ein neues Metrum, oder eine neue Art von Gesängen - what you have primarily discovered is a new way of of looking at things. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or again, a new metre, or a new kind of song

so sitzt uns ein Bild im Kopf, das mit dem der gewöhnlichen Ausdrucksweise streitet. - we have got a picture in our heads which conflicts with the picture of our ordinary way of speaking

Dies wäre eine etwas seltsame Ausdrucksweise - that would be a rather queer way of speaking

Wir werden irregeführt durch die Ausdrucksweise - we are mislead by this way of putting it

Und gibt es nur eine Art, das zu tun? - and is there only one way of doing it?[/i

Diese Redeweise ist psychologisch ernst zu nehmen. Warum sollte sie weniger ernst zu nehmen sein als die Aussage, der Glaube sei ein Zustand der Seele? (Luther: »Der Glaube ist unter der linken Brustzitze.«) - Psychologically this way of speaking is to be taken seriously. Why should it be taken less seriously than the assertion that belief is a state of mind? (Luther: 'faith is under the left nipple')

Und auf die Gefühle, etc. als auf eine Betrachtungsweise, eine Deutung, des Sprachspiels! - and look on the feelings, etc, as you look on a way of regarding the language-game, as an interpretation

oder ein Schließen der Augen, das man ein »Nach-Innen-Blicken« nennen könnte. - or a way of shutting one's eyes which might be called 'looking into oneself'

....well this was fascinating? Not sure what use it is, though...
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by schyrsivochter »

Salmoneus wrote: Aber läßt sich denn das Wort »Farbe«, oder »Länge« nur so auffassen? - but is there only one way of taking the word 'colour' or 'length'?
That’s classical or ‘old’ German orthography from before the 1996 spelling revision. Correct would be „lässt“ instead of „läßt“.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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schyrsivochter wrote:
Salmoneus wrote: Aber läßt sich denn das Wort »Farbe«, oder »Länge« nur so auffassen? - but is there only one way of taking the word 'colour' or 'length'?
That’s classical or ‘old’ German orthography from before the 1996 spelling revision. Correct would be „lässt“ instead of „läßt“.
Wittgenstein was writing before 1996, in most theories not involving time machines. You'll also note in the above the English word "shew", the standard spelling before our own anti-shew spelling revision. [our spelling revisions are smaller and entirely unofficial, but probably even more vicious toward targeted words - most modern speakers won't even recognise "shew" as a word, even though it was the recommended spelling up to about 50 years ago.

EDIT: just checked, and my '06 3rd edition anscombe en face still has the 'old' German spelling; I strongly suspect the 4th edition will as well. Wittgenstein don know no laws, foo!
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by schyrsivochter »

… well, maybe he just kept it the way it was originally. I should have thought of that.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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schyrsivochter wrote:… well, maybe he just kept it the way it was originally. I should have thought of that.
...he was writing in the 1940s! He didn't keep it as it was, he just didn't know how the Germans were going to change their spelling forty years after his death...

It may also be relevant that Wittgenstein was Austrian, not German, and I gather thant the '96 reform hasn't been universally accepted in Austria in any case.

... but in sad news, it appears the 4th edition has changed 'shew' to 'show' in the English. Damn it! Stupid 'approachability' concerns bah humbug.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by schyrsivochter »

Salmoneus wrote:
schyrsivochter wrote:… well, maybe he just kept it the way it was originally. I should have thought of that.
...he was writing in the 1940s! He didn't keep it as it was, he just didn't know how the Germans were going to change their spelling forty years after his death...
I meant the person who posted it and the publishers of the source where he’s got it from, not the author himself. :'D
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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Is anyone good at reading Kurrent? I can't for the life of my figure out these 2 words. I've put them in an image below.

1. is Die gewerblose Maria Engels. It's the second word which I can't read. I can't find "gewerblose" in any dictionary or anywhere really except 1000 hits on Google so I'm assuming I must have it wrong.

2. Is a name. I've got Des Secretariatsassistent Paul Adigaldäger But that name isn't being found as a German surname by Google so I must not have it right. The last image is the same name signed by the individual himself.

Also is it "Secretariatsassistent" or "Secretariatassistent"? There looks to be an "s" in there to me but everything tells me there shouldn't be an "s".

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by schyrsivochter »

Viktor77 wrote:1. is Die gewerblose Maria Engels. It's the second word which I can't read. I can't find "gewerblose" in any dictionary or anywhere really except 1000 hits on Google so I'm assuming I must have it wrong.
No, it looks like a perfect ‘gewerblose’ to me. It’s the adjective gewerblos – I assume it is an older word for unemployed.
Viktor77 wrote:Des Secretariatsassistent Paul Adigaldäger But that name isn't being found as a German surname by Google so I must not have it right. The last image is the same name signed by the individual himself.
Looks like ‘Ahligschläger’ to me … but did you realise that that’s not actual Kurrent? The lowercase h, for instance, in the second picture, looks like a normal handwritten h.
Viktor77 wrote:Also is it "Secretariatsassistent" or "Secretariatassistent"? There looks to be an "s" in there to me but everything tells me there shouldn't be an "s".
There’s an s in there alright. It’s a Fugen-s, linking s. In German composites, there’s often an s inserted between two components. In scripts with long ſ and round s, this is always written with a round s.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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schyrsivochter wrote:Looks like ‘Ahligschläger’ to me … but did you realise that that’s not actual Kurrent? The lowercase h, for instance, in the second picture, looks like a normal handwritten h.
Thank you. And here I don't think this is a handwritten 'h' in typical cursive because everywhere else the Kurrent double-looped 'h' is used so I can't see them changing it here. That's why I thought that maybe it was an "Ad".
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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schyrsivochter wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:1. is Die gewerblose Maria Engels. It's the second word which I can't read. I can't find "gewerblose" in any dictionary or anywhere really except 1000 hits on Google so I'm assuming I must have it wrong.
No, it looks like a perfect ‘gewerblose’ to me. It’s the adjective gewerblos – I assume it is an older word for unemployed.
Remember that until a few decades ago, most women did not have any occupation other than "housewife". The past is a foreign country ;)
Viktor77 wrote:Des Secretariatsassistent Paul Adigaldäger But that name isn't being found as a German surname by Google so I must not have it right. The last image is the same name signed by the individual himself.
Looks like ‘Ahligschläger’ to me … but did you realise that that’s not actual Kurrent? The lowercase h, for instance, in the second picture, looks like a normal handwritten h.
I read Ohligschläger here.
Viktor77 wrote:Also is it "Secretariatsassistent" or "Secretariatassistent"? There looks to be an "s" in there to me but everything tells me there shouldn't be an "s".
There’s an s in there alright. It’s a Fugen-s, linking s. In German composites, there’s often an s inserted between two components. In scripts with long ſ and round s, this is always written with a round s.
Yep. It is Sekretariatsassistent, with a Fugen-s.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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WeepingElf wrote:Remember that until a few decades ago, most women did not have any occupation other than "housewife". The past is a foreign country ;)
Hehe yes indeed, and this term must be really antiquated as I can't even find the non-inflected form in my dictionary.

But that'd make sense for a document from 1901. It also threw me off when I read "siebenzig" and "siebenzehn."
WeepingElf wrote:I read Ohligschläger here.
It must start with an "A" because that's a Kurrent "A." I think if it were "sch" we'd see an "s" that hung below the line and the "h" like the other "h" would be written à la Kurrent.
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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I also read Ohligschläger here. Which has the advantage that it's an existing family name, while *Ahligschläger isn't. As an Illustration, see this Google search, where Google even autocorrects Ahligschläger (for which it cannot find any hits) to Ohligschläger.

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Re: Questions about German Thread

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hwhatting wrote:I also read Ohligschläger here. Which has the advantage that it's an existing family name, while *Ahligschläger isn't. As an Illustration, see this Google search, where Google even autocorrects Ahligschläger (for which it cannot find any hits) to Ohligschläger.
I know, it's what I thought too at first but it must be an "A" because as an "O" it wouldn't follow Kurrent script and the entire document is written in standard Kurrent. The "h" here wouldn't follow Kurrent either, as everywhere else the author has used the real Kurrent "h" which looks more like a modern cursive "f". It's just some official's name though, so it doesn't matter much in the end if it's ever decoded, it's just the only thing I haven't figured out. :P
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Re: Questions about German Thread

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Viktor77 wrote: I know, it's what I thought too at first but it must be an "A" because as an "O" it wouldn't follow Kurrent script and the entire document is written in standard Kurrent. The "h" here wouldn't follow Kurrent either, as everywhere else the author has used the real Kurrent "h" which looks more like a modern cursive "f". It's just some official's name though, so it doesn't matter much in the end if it's ever decoded, it's just the only thing I haven't figured out. :P
To be honest, taking the fact that such a last name is not attested in German would lead me to the conclusion that the document is not written in Kurrent in its entirety. :-)

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Now I checked this table to refresh my memory. The first letter in the name is much closer to "O" than "A" - it's basically an oval and doesn't have the descending line on the right that's typical for Kurrent "A". In the field marked "3", only the hook at the top is missing, but see how it's there (and used for joining) in the signature.
All "h"s in the name (both in "Ohlig-" and in "schläger") are not written in Kurrent, but in forms similar to modern German cursive.

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Viktor77
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Viktor77 »

hwhatting wrote:Now I checked this table to refresh my memory. The first letter in the name is much closer to "O" than "A" - it's basically an oval and doesn't have the descending line on the right that's typical for Kurrent "A". In the field marked "3", only the hook at the top is missing, but see how it's there (and used for joining) in the signature.
All "h"s in the name (both in "Ohlig-" and in "schläger") are not written in Kurrent, but in forms similar to modern German cursive.
It looks like I owe you an apology. I looked at the document again and the "h" is in fact written the way it is in modern German cursive. It was only the capital "H" that was written in Kurrent. I fucked that up. Oligschläger must in fact be the name. Thanks!
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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Zju »

What is the original pronunciation of unstressed ‹e›'s? I've left with the impression that unstressed vowels in Proto-Germanic either dropped or reduced to [ə] and only later some dialects secondarily shifted them to [ɛ] or [e].

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Zju wrote:I've left with the impression that unstressed vowels in Proto-Germanic either dropped or reduced to [ə] and only later some dialects secondarily shifted them to [ɛ] or [e].
Proto-Germanic? The development happened much later, in the transition from Old High German to Midle High German (Old English to Middle English, respectively); it didn't happen at all in some Germanic languages, like Icelandic or the Walliser dialect of German.

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by Zju »

hwhatting wrote:
Zju wrote:I've left with the impression that unstressed vowels in Proto-Germanic either dropped or reduced to [ə] and only later some dialects secondarily shifted them to [ɛ] or [e].
Proto-Germanic? The development happened much later, in the transition from Old High German to Midle High German (Old English to Middle English, respectively); it didn't happen at all in some Germanic languages, like Icelandic or the Walliser dialect of German.
But which pronunciation is older? Or are they both results of the same sound shift, being regional variants of each other? And a follow-up question: how is one supposed to read those transcriptions? I thought using the German orthography conventions, but then there's ë. I really hope there's some established standard and it's not just ad hoc transcriptions.

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Re: Questions about German Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Zju wrote:But which pronunciation is older? Or are they both results of the same sound shift, being regional variants of each other?
I don't know. The standard account I know is that OHG unaccented vowele either were retained, at least as short vowel, in certain derivational endings (e.g. -ig, -lich, -ung), became schwa, or were lost, in MHG, without saying anything about an intermediate state or alternative development, whether to /e/, /ε/, or whatever. I checked my usual sources (dtv-Atlas zur Deutschen Sprache, Hans Eggers "Deutsche Sprachgeschichte", Weinhold-Ehrismann-Moser "Kleine Mittehochdeutsche Grammatik") and none of them mentions anything. Only in the latter work there's something which may have a connection:
Weinhold-Ehrismann-Moser wrote:Especially in Alemannian*1) full final syllable vowels have frequently been preserved: o (ô) in the weak ôn-conjugation, in the superlative, in the weak declination (here also u): boton, botun Boten (messengers); i in verb forms, especially 1., 3. Pers. present subjunctive: heti, giengi, for the fem. suffix OHG î: starki Stärke (strength), schoeni Schönheit (beauty); a in the Adverbs dannan, hinnan.
(Translated from German by me)
*1) The MHG dialect of Alemannian

This fits with Walliser German (an Alemannic dialect) keeping the full vowels even today, and perhaps means that the development happened later in Alemannic, with a different result (/e/ or /ε/ instead of schwa), but who knows.
Zju wrote:And a follow-up question: how is one supposed to read those transcriptions? I thought using the German orthography conventions, but then there's ë. I really hope there's some established standard and it's not just ad hoc transcriptions.
There's a tradition of using "ë" in OHG and MHG philology, and in German dialectology which often traces back dialectal to OHG and MHG forms:
Wikipedia entry on MHG wrote: Grammars (as opposed to textual editions) often distinguish between <ë> and <e>, the former indicating the mid-open /ɛ/ which derived from Germanic /e/, the latter (often with a dot beneath it) indicating the mid-close /e/ which results from primary umlaut (umlaut of short /a/). No such orthographic distinction is made in MHG manuscripts.
I just note, BTW, that the English wiki entry on MHG is of better quality than the German one - very strange.

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