We’ve come to the very end of our Early Germanic Dialect series!
I’ve simply run out of dialects! We’ve done Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German! We’ve even done a reminder, a post on the relationship between the Germanic dialects and a post on Proto-Germanic itself!
So now what?
Well, I figure that I’ve been throwing features of phonology, syntax, morphologyl, etc., etc., at you for quite some time now – how will anyone ever remember all those details?!
Instead of continuing to throw such facts at you (however interesting they may be), today, I thought I’d tell you about my very special trick – a simple one that works in (some) cases – though not all – to separate all these dialects from each other, fairly quickly. (Just don’t quote me on it – it’s just to give you an inkling of what you’re working with so that you can continue with further tests to make sure.)
So, what do I do?
Well, if presented with a new text where I am unsure of which Germanic dialect I am dealing with, the first thing I do is start looking for pronouns. But not just any old pronoun – I look specifically for the masculine third person pronoun in the nominative form!
Gosh, that was specific. But, you see, these pronouns differ a bit from each other in some of the Germanic dialects.
| Gothic | Old Norse | Old English | Old Saxon | Old Frisian | Old Low Franconian | Old High German |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| is | hann | he | he | hi | he | er |
As you can see, using this technique means that you can exclude a number of choices: if the text is using hann it is likely Old Norse; if it uses er, it is likely Old High German.
Gothic may be a bit tricky as the morphological structure may allow for excluding the pronoun itself – in that case: look for reduplication as Gothic is the only Germanic language that has retained the feature!
But, as you can also see, that won’t help you all the way: Old English, Old Saxon, and Old Low Franconian all use he. So what do we do here?
Well, here, we start looking for a-stem nominative plurals in Proto-Germanic – like arms.
And, here, we see some differences between these languages too!
| Old English | Old Saxon | Old Low Franconian |
|---|---|---|
| -as | -os | -a |
| dagas | dagos | daga |
And that is it! That is really all that I do (in the initial stages – then it all needs to be checked of course).
Basically, just ask yourself:
- Does it use reduplication? – If YES, you’re dealing with Gothic
- Which masculine third person plural is it using? – If a unique one, you’re in luck. If not:
- Which declension of Proto-Germanic a-stem nouns is the text using?
And you’re… well, not really golden but a step closer to figuring out exactly what you’re dealing with!
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And with that, I am hereby declaring our Early Germanic Dialect series at an end.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about these dialects as much as I enjoyed the opportunity to read more about them!
Next week, we’re doing a bit of a breather for you (and me) with a book review before we dive into our next topic (and no, I won’t tell you what it is – surprises are delightful!).
So, join me next week when I take a look at the #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss (and perhaps an inkling of what is to come….)!
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References
As always, take a look at Robinson’s book Old English and its closest relatives.
For this post, I’ve also made use of Wikipedia’s entry for the etymology of day