German Life and Letters 44:2 January 1991 0016-8777 $2.00

C. J. WELLS AND HISTORIES O F T H E GERMAN LANGUAGE

GERALD NEWTON

Whorf once remarked that you could play billiards without having to know about the physics of the billiard table.’ He might well have gone on to say also that you did not need to know anything about the history of the game, its place in society, or foreign influences on the people who played it. Whorf, however, was contrasting the ability to manipulate language with the ability to analyse it, and few people today, in a world where microchips can be arranged to convert thoughts in one language to vocal expression in another, would deny the application of that knowledge. The history of the language, however, would appear to be more difficult to argue for, the logic and particular genius of any language being seen as nebulous concepts of little practical value, and the struggle towards standardisation in German now regarded as having reached completion. Yet a glance at any modern socio-linguistic text concerning German would show that pluricentricity, dialect, sociolect, differences of speech and writing still continue to play an important role in the German-speaking countries. It is the historical explanation of these which is of particular value in understanding the present, and represents the next stage of a learner’s development once a working knowledge of German has been acquired. It is heartening therefore to be able to welcome one further text on this theme: C(hristopher) J(on) Wells, German; A Linguistic Histoy to 1945 (Oxford 1985, xvi + 591pp., ISBN 0-19-815795-9, E45.00). Clearly written and addressing the advanced English-speaking learner of German, this book also examines the various schools of linguistic thought and the ways in which they have adapted their theories to the historical study of German. This approach, which is both unusual and refreshingly helpful, is one of the strong points of Wells’s work, and one which ensures it a place amongst the already extensive panoply of histories of the German language, as the following account, which seeks to outline the development of such histories, will illustrate.

The first history of the German language, specimen philologiae germanicae continens disquisitiones H I . de linguae nostrae vernaculae historia, methodo et dignitate, NORIMB., dates from 1642, and was written by the Nuremberg scholar and poet, Georg Philipp Harsdorffer. This is no history, however, in the modern sense, and like most of the work of the German ‘Sprachgesellschaften’ during a century which included the Thirty Years’ War, it was intended as a measure of praise for German virtues in the face of foreign adversity. But if Harsdorffer belonged to the age before the strict discipline of linguistic science had been evolved, long before Franz Bopp’s rigorous description of Sanskrit (1816)2 and Rasmus Rask‘s investigations into Old Norse (1818)3 had inspired Jacob Grimm to evolve the strict methodology which ensured his lasting fame, then Grimm, too, no less than Harsdorffer, was driven by ideas of German

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nationalism, When, for example, he completed his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Leipzig) in the March of 1848, the preface he gave to it ran as follows:

in wie ungelegener zeit nun mein buch erscheine . . . ist es doch . . . durch und durch politisch. es lehrt, dasz unser volk nach dem abgeschuttelten joch der Romer seinen namen und seine frische freiheit zu den Romanen in Gallien, Italien, Spanien und Britannien getragen, mit seiner vollen kraft allein den sieg des christenthums entschieden und sich als undurch- brechlichen damm gegen die ungestum nachriickenden Slaven in Europas mitte aufgestellt hat.

Grimm, of course, was in that year politically active as a member of the Frankfurt Parliament (‘Erbkaiserpartei’), but many subsequent histories (August Schleicher, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Stuttgart 1860; Wilhelm Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deu.!schm Sprache, Berlin 1868; Rudolf von Raumer, Geschichte der deutschen Philologie, Munich 1870; Herman Hirt, GeschichtederdeutschenSprache, Munich 1919; Adolf Bach, Geschichte derdeutschen Sprache, Leipzig 1938)4 were also imbued with ideas of German nationalism. It seemed difficult to separate the history of the language from the history of the German race (or, as it later became, ‘the blood’): the linguistic purist J. H . Campe (1807) had even referred to the language as

das einzige letzte Band, welches uns noch volkerschaftlich zusammenhalt, . . . zugleich der einzige noch ubrige Hoffnungsgrund, der uns zu erwarten berechtiget, dai3 der Deutsche Name in den Jahrbuchern der Menschheit nicht ganz verschwinden ~ e r d e , ~

while Wilhelm Scherer (1841-86) was overjoyed at being able to publish the revised version of Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (Gottingen 1819-37) only a few days after the commencement of the Franco-Prussian War.6

However, despite its obviously nationalistic origins, the science of language, and the rigorousness with which the Germans pursued it, soon became suffi- ciently well-known in Britain, particularly through the lectures delivered by the German Sanskritist and Oxford Professor, Friedrich Max Miiller, to the Royal Institution in 1860,7 that many Englishmen felt they should go to Germany and study the new science, many of them to return with the Doctorate in Philosophy not then obtainable from British universities. The concept of Darwinism was added to the studies as an extra and exciting new dimension for linguistics by August Schleicher (1821-68) in the 1860s,* and as new laws, apparently as fixed as the formulae of the natural sciences, and perhaps pro- viding the key to the mystery of our ancient origins locked away in the language archive of Germanic and Indo-Germanic, emerged to ‘prove’ the logic behind what had been considered to be anomalies, the ‘Junggrammatiker’ (‘Neo- grammarians’), Karl Brugmann (1849-1919), Hermann Osthoff (1847-1909), Hermann Paul (1846-1921), appeared to have reached the ultimate ‘state of the art’.9 In England these ideas were incorporated into the teaching of German at Oxford by Mullefs assistant and eventual successor, Joseph Wright (1855-1930; Dr.Phil., insi’ia cum la&, Heidelberg 1885), who had studied under Brugmann at Leipzig and had translated some of the latter’s work into English.lo

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Once the study of philology had been seen to have achieved respectability, it was used at Oxford as a means of limiting the number of bilingual speakers obtaining scholarships to Modern Languages. ‘ I Thus the subject became part of the syllabus there, and then also at other British universities. Textbooks used were German ones, or else Muller’s own publications.’* As the German ones13 generally made very difficult reading for English students, who lacked the cultural background taken for granted by the German scholars as well as the mathematics demanded of comparative philologists in Germany, a need was perceived to produce a history of the German language which was written in English. The first of these appeared in 1886 and bore the title Outlines of a History of the German Language by H. A. Strong and Kuno Meyer.I4 The book, of 140 pages, was heavily modelled on Schleicher’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (in the 1879 edition) and thus contained as much about the various aspects of Indo-European as it did about the development of the German standard language. But since it also dwelt on such aspects of the vocabulary as prehistory (‘linguistic palaeontology’) and folk etymology, it became generally very popular, and was still in vogue amongst students some forty years later.I5 It was also useful in that it explained the principles of linguistic science as they were then being set forth by Hermann Paul in his Principien dm Sprachgeschichte, Halle 1880. Linguistic analysis of the development of German, limited to accidence only, was contained in a final section of the book. Strong and Meyer themselves considered their Outlines simply to serve as an introduction to Teutonic philology and stated laconically (p. iii) that ‘a good history of the German language has, as far as the authors know, still to be written’.

The timing was fortunate, for at the same time as Outlines appeared in London, a work of similar length though of rather more genius appeared in Leipzig. Entitled Die deutsche Sprache, by Otto Behaghel (b. Karlsruhe 1854, d . Munich 1936; Professor in Basel, from 1888 in Giessen), this was an immediate success and found use and approval in both German and British universities. To make the text even more accessible to British students, it was translated for Macmillans in 1891 by Emil Trechmann, M.A. (Oxon.), Ph.D. (sic) of the University of Sydney, and, under the title ofA Short Historical Grammar ofthe German Language, continued to be reprinted in this translation until 1917. However, while Trechmann’s version remained unchanged from the first edition, Behaghel’s German version was added to considerably on each impres- sion, which allowed it eventually to become such a cornerstone that its last reprinting took place at HalleBaale in 1968 (14th edition). In 1895, it was joined on English reading lists by an equally popular French text by Henri Lichtenberger (1864-1941, Professor, Sorbonne), Histoire de l’allemand, Paris, which simultaneously showed an outsider’s point of view and was possibly more immediately readable to an English audience of that era.

At that time most modern linguists would already have had a thorough grounding in the philological principles of Latin and possibly also of Greek, and it could readily be assumed that their familiarity with Latin case-endings would lead them to take an interest in the development of Latin cognates within

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the Germanic group, and how, also, that Germanic group differed in phonology from the classical languages of Greece and Rome. The idea that endings were perfection of language had been originated by Bopp and enthroned by Grimm; it was only natural that this should have formed the first occupation of the new students of German. Historical grammar was also very ‘learnable’ and ideal to ‘cram’. It also led into the study of M H G and of O H G , where there were many texts still awaiting research.

The sound-shifts, therefore, tended to be treated as an entity in their own right, linking as they did the classical past with the nineteenth-century present. Texts giving only ‘Laut-’ and ‘Formenlehre’ were sold in large numbers, and even effected change in Behaghel, whose preliminary version of his second work on the history of German, Geschichte derdeutschen Sprache (Strasbourg 191 l), which had first appeared in 1891 as pages 526-633 of Hermann Paul’s Grundrg der germanischen Philolopie (also Strasbourg), was almost wholly taken up with this aspect, as was the Oxford Historical G m n Grammar of 1907, intended by Joseph Wright, its author, to serve as the foundation-stone of Germanic philology in Britain, and further exemplified by him in introductions to a whole series of Oxford studies16 concerned with the history of ancient Germanic (a quarter of Historical German Grammar is dedicated to the development of vowel sounds alone). This approach continued to flourish in Germany (cf. Friedrich Kauffmann, Deutsche Grammatik, 6th edition, Marburg 1913; Hans Schulz, AbriJ der deutschen Grammatik, Strasbourg 1914) and in England became typified for generations of students in Arthur Kirk’s Introduction to the Historical Study o f N e w High German (Manchester 1923), which continued to be used as a university textbook in this country until the 1970s (it was reprinted in 1961)’ while in America the same approach was to be found in Tobias Diekhoffs The German Language, Outlines of its Development, New York 1914 and Eduard Prokosch‘s A n Outline of G e m a n Historical Grammar, New York 1933.

Behaghel‘s Deutsche Sprache of 1886 had also contained information on another aspect of the history of the languge - its social background - which occupied nearly a quarter of the text. In Germany, this type of language study was known as ‘die aufiere Geschichte’, while hard-fact historical grammar was called ‘die innere Geschichte’ (German now speaks of ‘sprachexterne’ and ‘sprachinterne Formen’, ‘extralinguistic’ and ‘intralinguistic forms’). As historical linguistics progressed, and knowledge of the ‘innere Geschichte’ became more or less fixed, with developments confined to speculation concerning Indo-European, it became customary to include more of the ‘aufiere Geschichte’, since, unlike reconstructed forms, this was knowable, although not so clear-cut with regard to what Strong and Meyer (p. iv) referred to as ‘the poetry of the Science and its ascertained fact’. Wells tells us (p. 6) that such socio-cultural accounts (cf. Friedrich Kluge’s Von Luther bis Lessing, sprachgeschichtliche Aufsutze, Darmstadt 1888, and Adolf Socin’s Schrftsprache und Dialekte im Deutschen nach Zeugnissen alter und neuer Zeit, Heilbronn 1888) often ‘made up in patriotism and nationalism for their lack of consistent discussion’.’7 But while it was eventually to become increasingly obvious that the ‘auBere Geschichte’ could be twisted to serve both

C. J . WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN 169

political and racialist goals,18 the ‘innere Geschichte’ did not escape such atten- tions either, particularly during World War I, when even the name German was ‘proved’ to share common origin withJesus.’g None the less, controversy about the spread of printing and the influence of Martin Luther, or ofcottsched, could be smoothed over by the inclusion of texts to underline points, texts in particular which illustrated the striving for standardisation, and the resistance, o r other- wise, to foreign words in German. Such collections - and they were necessary, as many of the texts would otherwise have been unavailable to students - began with Socin and Kluge in 1888, and have continued by way of Herman Hirt (op. cit. , 19 19/25) and Sigmund Feist , Die Deutsche Sprache: kurzer Abr$ der Geschichte unserer Muttersprache uon den altesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, Stuttgart 1906133, to Hugo Moser, Deutsche Sprachgeschzchte, Stuttgart 1950, and Hans Eggers, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte, Reinbek 1963-77 (although Kluge’s later work, Deutsche Sprachgeschzchte, Leipzig 1920, is, in view of Von Luther bis Lessing, surprisingly lacking in its provision of texts). Later still, maps of linguistic expansion were included in the histories, notably by the well-known dialectologists Adolf Bach, op. cit., 1938, and Theodor Frings, Grundlegung einer Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Halle 1948. As a knowledge of the classical languages can now no longer be taken for granted at our universities, the ‘aul3ere Geschichte’ has, with some exceptions, taken over much of the ground previously allotted to the ‘innere Geschichte’.

The other area in which Behaghel’s Deutsche Sprache of 1886 was strong was in explaining the ‘principles oflanguage’ as they were understood at that time. Both this and the introduction to Strong and Meyer were based largely on Hermann Paul’s Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 1880. Further work along these lines was thereafter excluded from the histories of German, as the ‘innere Geschichte’ took over, and apart from incidental coverage in the work of Leonard Bloomfield (Language, New York 1933), who besides being a general linguist was also a Germanist, had to wait until Adolf Bach in 1938 and Hugo Moser in 1950. In German, the most readily available treatments along these lines at the present time are to be found in W . Konig, dtu-Atlasturdeutschen Sprache, 1978 (compended and compressed, though with attractive illustrations and maps) and W. Besch, 0. Reichmann, S. Sonderegger (eds), HSK Sprachgeschichte, BerlinlNew York 198415.2” It is particularly welcome, therefore, to see Wells publish in English a text which also covers these principles in depth, and discusses how they have been employed to exploit the corpus of German historical material.

For many years, the definitive work on the history of German in English was that produced in 1934 by Robert Priebsch (1866-1935; Professor ofGerman Language and Literature, University of London, 1902-3 1) and William Edward Collinson (1889-1969; Professor of German, University of Liverpool, 1914-54). The German Language (London) continued into six editions, the lay; being in 1968. The book combined a deep and scholarly study of the ‘innere Geschichte’ with a keen interest in the ‘aul3ere Geschichte’ expressed by Collinson’s own love of loan words and foreignisms in German, the development of the standard, its dialects, spelling and pronunciation - even German handwriting and the genius of the German language were covered. The text, however, followed

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Behaghel’s 1886 pattern of division by development of systems, in the areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, these being seen as grammatical features moving from one period to another, without the treatment of any of those periods as a separate entity. (Kirk‘s 1923 Introduction to the Historical Study of New High German, brief in comparison (85pp.), actually did do this, and presumably retained its popularity by doing so.) Priebsch and Collinson’s G m n Language was further characterised by presenting the reader with huge slabs of information as though on tablets of stone descended from the mountain. Bibliography was scant (though over the years it grew), and awkwardly placed, not all together at the end of the book, but deep in the text, at the end of certain chapters only. This, coupled with the absence of a general index, made it an extremely frustrating textbook for students to use.

In 1966, John T. Waterman took issue with this aspect of ‘Priebsch and Collinson’, and also once more with its non-arrangement by period, when he published his own History ofthe German Language, Washington, aimed largely at the American reader. The balance was redressed, and not only was the German language examined period by period, but the reader was also given a good select bibliography and general index, which made the contents much more accessible than those of The German Language. In 1970, W. Walker Chambers and John R. Wilkie, A Short History of the German Language, London, followed the same general pattern as Waterman, and may possibly be regarded as the new Kirk, though with much expanded ‘ a d e r e Geschichte’. Charles V. J. Russ, Historical German Phonology andMorphology, Oxford 1978, though compressed, may be added as the ‘new Wright’. It was, however, disappointing in 1978, when Faber and Faber replaced the aging Priebsch and Collinson with R. E. Keller’s The German Language (four years in the press), that they did not allow Keller the space he would have liked to print the full bibliographies he had intended, but merely confined him to the end-of-chapter format which had so hampered Priebsch and Collinson. Wells on the other hand now presents one of the most extensive and useful bibliographies of the German language available in English. He has also added select bibliographies to each of his chapters, and supplemented each with copious footnotes. These can hardly be bettered, and the Clarendon Press must be con- gratulated for allowing them to occupy nearly one fifth of the text. The notes are further enhanced by an admirable general index, and the book proceeds with the same chronological clearness through the periods as does Keller. This allows detailed historical change to be linked clearly to the society which produced i t . It does also, unfortunately, allow us to see the vast amount of research work which still needs to be undertaken before a clear outline of the sequence of events from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, neatly labelled with dates, can emerge. Here once more, however, the strengths of Wells’s book are revealed and he points out areas of research still to be undertaken, and guides the final-year undergraduate, for whom he is largely writing, to further study.

Also specific to this readership, though not without their general interest, are the preliminary remarks made by Wells on the application of state-of-the- art linguistic theories to an exploitation of the corpus of German historical material. That corpus, unfortunately, is severely limited, both in scope and

C . J. WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN 171

in having been passed down to us solely in written form. This, along with the doubts introduced by borrowing and scribal transmission, makes a systemic approach to the corpus almost impossible, and has caused problems for structuralists and generativists alike. To his credit, Wells examines these in great depth (pp. 70-94), particularly with reference to OHG, and, taking the work of William G. Moulton, Paul Valentin, Herbert Penzl for the struc- turalists, and Joseph B. Voyles for the generativists, explains their hopes and limitations, while comparing their ideas with those of the pre-structuralists whose fascination with ‘data output’, as Wells calls it (i.e. parole), for its own sake may have led them to lose sight of any system contained within it , but who none the less catalogued the great body of material still remaining today for anyone to remould to their own current theories. Wells tells us that in the absence of confirmation, structuralists have confined their attentions to phonology and morphology, and kept away from ‘people’, while as far as the generativists are concerned, the link between competence and the output of competence cannot be established, and a generative grammar would not in any case take into account speech communities (generation is the work of an individual and not a community). All this, Keller - implicitly structuralist - tells us to go off and find out for ourselves (The German Language, p. 1).

Nevertheless, one cannot escape the feeling that what Wells is explaining to us could also be interpreted as an apologia for producing yet another history of the language with a pedigree traceable back through Moser, Bach, Hirt, to Behaghel. But that would be uncharitable, and we cannot blame Wells for the shortcomings of his material. In any case, it is precisely the output and ways in which it can help them to understand the modern language and place it into its context which is of interest to modern learners of German.

Wells’s coverage of the German language from the earliest times onwards follows the received patterns of morphological syncretism, definite article development, and the controversies surrounding the groupings into which scholars have placed the various branches of Germanic. The nature of West Franconian is described particularly as being a ‘hornets’ nest’ (p. 50), while Joachim Schildt’s GDR attempt of 1976 (AbriJ der Geschichte der deutschen S’rache, zum Verhiiltnis uon Gesellschafts- und Spruchgeschichte, Berlin) to re-periodise German into ‘tribalism (5oo~BC-4ooAD)’, ‘feudalism ( 4 0 0 ~ ~ - 1 789)’, ‘bourgeoishmperialist (1789-1945)’ is dismissed as ‘ideologically orientated’ (p. 19).*’ The first of the Sound Shifts appears in the text along with analysis of methodological approach (pp. 72-3), but rather than break further the continuity of his text with infor- mation concerning the Second Sound Shift, Wells has conveniently placed this in an appendix of its own, which greatly facilitates reference for his later chapters on High German.

An examination of the various registers of O H G leads into discussion of the O H G colloquial language as preserved in the Cassel Glosses and the Paris Conversations. These would have been a boon to any traveller (p. 65), allowing him to get a haircut (tundi meo capilli, ‘skir min fahs’), have his beard trimmed (radi meo barba, ‘skir minen part’), and understand simple inquiries about his nationality (de quu patria?, ‘gueliche lande cumen ger?’). Unfortunately these are

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not further glossed by Wells from O H G and Latin into English and NHG. The phonology of O H G allows Wells to examine the linguistic theories behind

it, and (on p. 70) he considers the pre-structuralist, structuralist, and generativist approaches. These range from the trees, analogies and sound-laws of the nineteenth century, illustrated by Wells on the example of Verner’s Law, via the structuralists’ interest in the relational aspects of language,** to the genera- tivists’ interest in underlying patterns and deep structures. Since there is, however, according to Wells, ‘no access to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker and the surface structure material for O H G is limited in quantity and quality’ (p. 86), the generativists run the danger of circular argument, ‘arbitrarily attributing certain distinctive features to the elements on both sides of their equations in order to explain shifts in items whose true phonetic values they cannot know’ (p. 87), and ‘while the generativist presentation of phonological change is rigorous and has a quasi-mathematical clarity, its “input” remains the old Neogrammarian philological data, and its explanations are often only descriptions’(p. 87). T o illustrate the principles of the three schools under dis- cussion, Wells presents the reader with a very clear contrast of attitudes towards the description and development of Umlaut (pp. 88ff.). One is, however, left thinking that so much theory is good, but could not further application by Wells of generativist theory have appeared in the section on the twentieth century, where ‘the vast sources of material which survive’ may well change our theories of appraisal (p. 420)?

From Chapter I11 (The Medieval Period, 1050-1500), the theory is pushed to one side and in student terms the book becomes very ‘learnable’. For the M H G period, the ‘innere’ and ‘aufiere Geschichte’ are presented in equal amounts, and the names of scholars given each time in detail, i.e. ‘the Colonial Dialect theory of Theodor Frings’ (p. 135), or ‘W. Besch on E(ast) M(idd1e) G(erman) and south-east U(pper) G(erman)’ (p. 138). O n the morphology of M H G (Chapter IV), the material is not lacking once more in theoretical detail, the pre-structuralists’ ‘root’ being the structuralists’ ‘lexeme’, and so on (pp. 148ff.). The introduction to Chapter V (1450-1650) seems to indicate a break in the continuum of method, so much so that one wonders whether it was originally conceived as a separate article. None the less, the change from the ‘pre-grammarian phase’ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is adequately charted and the advent and spread of printing covered as well as the incomplete research available on the ‘Schreiblandschaften’ will allow. Thence we proceed to the influence of Bible translations, culminating in Luther’s versions of 1522ff. Wells however acknowledges the chaos which is Early New High German and stresses to us that ‘the linguistic role of Wittenberg in the sixteenth century will emerge fully only after the practice of other centres has been adequately described‘ (p. 193). What is clear, however, is the decline of Low German after the appearance of the High German Bible of Martin Luther (cf. pp. 198ff.), and the use of High German, once printing had arrived, for the first time as a political force, able to reach directly to the people, as i t did during the Peasant War of 1524-5 and during the Reformation. However, some of the vitriol that passed from Luther, Thomas Murner and the others is lost

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on any general audience that Wells might draw by the lack of translation into English (p. 210).

The way then proceeds through Humanism, which gave German ‘an inter- nationally familiar store of “ink-born words” which owed nothing to Luther, yet which made possible the flowering of scholarship and literature in the later seven- teenth century’ (p. 216), to spelling-guides and early grammars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At this time, too, the great influence of the Dutch grammarians on the development of High German becomes apparent, especially in the works of Wolfgang Ratke (157 1-1635), who borrowed many ofhis gram- matical terms from them (p. 222), and, later on, in the spelling systems of Philip von Zesen (1619-89) (p. 294). What happened in Dutch, however, does not appear to be one of Wells’s strengths and one should perhaps better consult Bruce C . Donaldson’s Dutch. A Linguistic History ofHolland and Belgium, Leiden 1983, for this. However, the detailed analysis of the syntax ofthe ENHG transitional period once more reflects the solid scholarship we have come to expect, as we are taken through concepts of verb and word-order theory. None the less, fixed dates of first occurrences would have been of much more use to the general reader. Instead of this, throughout the book we meet with phrases such as ‘by Notker’s time’, ‘by Boethius’ time’. It would have been helpful also to put dates by which words and phrases had become totally obsolete.

The fixing of the word order receives excellent treatment, particularly the development from looser sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forms of the ‘verbal frame’ (‘Satzrahmen’), to the much tighter ones with reduced tolerance for any ‘Nachtrag’ (p, 256), though Wells tells us that the geographical distribution and origin of the frame construction still remains unclear (p. 258), and that foreign influence on syntax is in need of further research: ‘the theories of Lat(in) influence are now out of favour, and at least two important features of German word order cannot derive from Lat.: the final position of the finite verb in dependent clauses, and the characteristic clausal frame (Sutzruhmen). Both might, however, be attributable to what contemporaries thought was Lat. style, and both seem redolent of the chancery’ (p. 261). This, however, goes against both Lockwood (1968) and Admoni (1985).2y

’

As regards the further structure of the book, Wells dedicates over a quarter of his text to developments within the N H G period (1600-1945). This allows for much more of the ‘auRere Geschichte’ to be discussed, and this too generally seems to be of greater interest to the modern undergraduate than the complex and under-researched varieties and developments of the E N H G period. The Defence of the Language (1600-1 700), Chapter VII, begins in typical vein with an explanation of concepts, and ways of viewing the - largely lexical - influences of this period. However, as with other surveys of this nature, fixed dates of borrowing are few and far between, and one feels always that the admirable ‘date of first literary use’ of the Oxford English Dictionary should be applied to all such studies, and the fuzziness not simply dismissed with statements such as ‘the quantification of borrowing in the seventeenth century is a difficult under- taking’ (p. 268). (Hans Schulz’s Deutsches Fremdworterbuch, Strasbourg, though

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left incomplete when Schulz was killed in action in 1915, began to give us dates as long ago as 1910.) One interesting point, however, brought up on the phonetic side, is the possible origin of NHG uvular /r/ allophones in O H G and not, as often stated, in the Huguenot-French settlement in leading cities of Protestant Germany (p. 273; the source is C . V . J . Russ, op. c i t . , pp. 85f.). Beyond this, all the usual materials can be found (i.e. Wallenstein’s letter of 1632 to the Emperor, first quoted as an example of the B la mode period of German by Kluge, op. c i t . , 1888, p. 181, then Feist, op. c i t . , 1933, p. 223, now Wells, p. 284), in well-organised and unslanted exposition, although Wells tells us (pp. 286ff.) that the influence of purism which came from the ‘Sprach- gesellschaften’ is easy to overstate, and that perhaps their greater achievement was Schottel’s concept of establishing a supra-regional variety of German ‘more venerable than any language in daily use’ (p. 287). It was easy, moreover, in such societies to ‘conflate language life and morals’ (p. 290), something which again in the guise of purism and nationalism has bedevilled German for over three centuries.

Wells then introduces us to the grammarians and littkrateurs of the Early Modern Period, whose chief concern was the ‘fixing‘ of grammatical and stylistic norms, and the rejection of the archaic and provincial and of all things which could not be entered under the headings of ‘vernunftig’, ‘aufgeklart’, ‘klar’, the three Enlightenment terms of best approval (p. 302). Because of their influence, an interest in dialect forms was not to return till the end of the nineteenth century. Of the many figures arising in this period, Wells has space only to draw broad-brush portraits of Gottsched (1 700-66), Klopstock (1 724-1803) and Adelung (1732-1806), and refers u s to M . H . Jellinek, Geschichte der neuhochdeutschen Grarnrnatik von den Anfngen bis aufAdelung, Heidelberg 19 13- 14, for the rest. He then gives us once more the theories of what a standard language should be, i.e. (1) Schottel’s analogical: correct German is supra-regional, not any particular dialect; (2) anornulist: the described usage of a group of speakers, such as in Meissen; (3) the description of the supra-regional form when it has been adapted by a particular region, Klopstock‘s ‘Hochdeutsch in nieder- deutschem Munde’ and Adelung’s ‘Nieder-Hochdeutsch‘. Nowhere, however, does he explain why so many generations of English-speakers should have been told that Hannover (or, probably more likely, Hanover) was the place to find such German.” But Wells does point out (p. 306) that while Adelung and Gottsched insisted that the usages thus put forward as exemplary should be those of the ‘obere Klassen’, nowhere do they define this term, thus inviting the comment, one supposes, that good society can always recognise itself.

The result at the spoken level of all this activity was that in the north particularly ‘a deep social wedge’ (p. 307) formed between Low German speakers and the High German norm, the lower classes being kept out of developments and left deliberately to remain illiterate (p. 310), women being particularly neglected, even in Weimar, as the bad spelling used by Christiane Vulpius- Goethe (1765-1816) would indicate.25 Wells tells us that this type of spelling is found in personal correspondence at all levels, up to the King, the spelling of anything not intended for publication being subject to much less rigour,

C . J . WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN 175

interchange of /g/j/g/ being particularly common. (In fact, Wilhelm Braune (1850-1926) suggested in 1905 that, after the Prussian victories of 1870, a Prussian officer caste might conceivably have made fashionable the pronun- ciation of /g/ initially in words in jut, Jott, Jurde, but was unsuccessful because of spelling tradition.)26 It is unfortunate that after all this investigation into the ‘Tyranny of Taste’ (p. 314) Wells does not give more background of the ‘lower’ orders of the German language, although he does cover ‘Umgangs- sprache’ as a concept, and its perceived lack of refinement in the eighteenth century for use on the stage.*’ A rare letter in Meissen dialect, criticised in detail by Gottsched and discussed by Wells (p. 318), follows and is refreshing. However, in this, as in many of the other texts he quotes, Wells would have benefited the general linguistic reader more by furnishing translations of the originals into English and NHG. Low and Upper Saxon dialects are also similarly lampooned (p. 320), as is Gottsched himself.** It would have been of greater interest if Wells had given us a list of the ‘best’ words according to Klopstock, Gottsched and Adelung, together with detailed comments on how these words then fared over the course of the next two centuries.

The Modern Period (Chapter IX, 1800-1945) is described as one of ‘unity and variety’, with no widespread phonological change, but one in which the debate concerning the ‘best German’ continued. The resistance to foreign influence, the breaking down of geographical barriers, together with the reduction in number of the absolutist states, plus population increase, the right of the individual to be able to change domicile (Law of 1871), the decrease in illiteracy, are all features which shaped the language in nineteenth-century Germany. However, Wells interestingly makes the point that ‘literacy’ does not imply ‘reading’: the middle classes were the ones who ‘read’, and the book language they acquired merely served to widen social gaps (p. 347), as did industrialisation itself, in that it created technical and specialist jargons, and the establishment of educational institutions ‘hostile to non-standard language’ (p. 347). This has led to the formation of ‘vertical’ divisions of speech (‘sociolects’) in addition to already existing ‘horizontal’ ones (‘dialects’), and to the develop- ment of levelled-out speech modes, or ‘Umgangssprachen’. Nor, according to Wells, was dialect really served at the end of the nineteenth century by writers such as Fritz Reuter (1810-74) and Klaus Groth (1819-99), who represented a type of literature which the State began to patronise as ‘heritage’ (p. 360) and which appealed mainly to the sentimentality of the middle classes. ‘In some respects Klaus Groth was a belated Enlightenment grammarian bent on purifying, ennobling and disseminating a canonical “pure” dialect for literary purposes’(p. 361). When the balance began to be redressed by Georg Wenker (1852-191 1; Chief Librarian, University of Marburg), in Dus Rheinische Plutt, Dusseldorf 1877, and the work carried on from this by Ferdinand Wrede (1863-1934; Professor in Marburg) in the Deutscher Spruchatlus, Marburg 1926-56, the concept of what was originally perfect and has subsequently been ‘corrupted’ was extended to include ‘pure dialect’ as well. What Wells does not tell us is that for nearly half a century this attitude inhibited the study of the so-called ‘corrupt’ urban varieties of the R ~ h r . ~ ~ Wells ignores this, and

176 C. J. WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN

instead restricts himself to colloquial developments in Berlin and Vienna only, which leads to a short section on Yiddish. One would have expected more.

The final chapter (X, continuing The Modern Period, 1800-1945) concerns itself with semantics, purism and politics, and tells us that the German failure to address semantic issues led to a concentration purely on the form of individual words (p. 393). This it was that brought about all the great efforts at super- ficial ‘Verdeutschung‘ for which the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are renowned.30 It also led to the slogans and catchwords of 1914-40, generally a hotchpotch of euphemisms and obfuscations designed to mislead and manipulate, but with some notable exceptions, as for example when Nazi efforts to avoid offending the Arabs, who were their allies, resulted in the use of antijiidisch for antisemitisch (p. 41 1). As Wells puts it, the death-knell for the purists in the Third Reich was ultimately sounded by Joseph Goebbels in a speech at the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943 (cited, curiously, in English, as footnote 32 to Chapter X), where Goebbels declared that ‘those with nothing better to do than seek about for German translations of common words like “Akkumulator” should be amongst the first to be sent to the front’.’”

What happened subsequently to this must remain a mystery to readers of Wells’s book, for his period ends with 1945. The setting-up of the two Germanies and any diversification this may have brought are not discussed beyond the drive to avoid Nazi-words (p. 348). Nor are the population shifts after 1945 discussed, except cursorily to say that ‘the settlers and refugees adulterate the dialects of the Federal Republic and disturb the linguistic homogeneity of those regions’ (p. 347), something which has been in dispute since W. F. Leopold’s studies of 1959 and 1961 32 and which has reached one of its latest disclaimers under the editorship of Werner Besch in Sprachverhalten in landischen Gemeinden. Ansatze zur Theorie und Methode. Forschungsbericht Erp-Projekt, I , Berlin 1981. An investigation into youth-language (tantalisingly mentioned by Wells on p. 16) is also not forthcoming, and would have been of great interest. Still, as Wells concludes, in words which curiously echo those of Strong and Meyer a hundred years earlier, ‘a comprehensive history of German in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still remains to be written’ (p. 386).

Despite this, the book remains a consistent treatment of its theme both of history of the language and scholarly attitudes towards the history of the language, written from the neutral standpoint of the outsider. Apart from occasional idiosyncrasies of style, chief of which seems to be the introduction of non-general concepts without further explanation (i.e. shibilants, p. 1 14; Holtzmann’s Law, p. 37; solidi, p. 78; Misnian, pp. 115, 304) and a tendency to send students scurrying to the dictionary for such words as ‘rebarbative’ (p. 92), the book is very readable and any further negative comment could only be derived from such perennial questions as whether one should use ‘Middle German’ (Wells) or ‘Central German’ (Priebsch-Collinson, Keller) for ‘Mittel- deutsch‘. The question now, however, is whether Wells’s book is the representative of a dying breed. Are the days of the ‘one man’ history now over? Has the ‘Sammelband’ replaced it?

One must now compare Wells’s work with HSK Sprachgeschichte, the great

C. J . WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN 177

collection of 177 articles embracing 2140 pages of 270mm x 190mm format and costing DM 1260 published by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, in 1984-5 in two volumes under the joint editorship of Werner Besch (Bonn), Oskar Reichmann (Heidelberg) and Stefan Sonderegger (Zurich). This collection of the work of a vast number of scholars systematically covers most aspects of the ‘innere’ and ‘aufiere Geschichte’ of German; it even includes articles such as that by Willi Mayerthaler on ‘Sprachgeschichte in der Sicht der generativen Transformationsgrammatik‘ (article 58), and extensive coverage of Low German as well as of High German, and a wide-ranging essay by Sonderegger (whose contributions to the work in terms of length (10 per cent) amount to more than those of the two other editors combined) on standard language and dialect in Switzerland. It has coverage of sections only touched on by Wells (though to be found in Priebsch and Collinson), such as place-name and personal-name study, ‘Volkskunde’ and the interaction of law and language. But as Lockwood remarks, ‘the historian of language. . . can do no more than offer selections from an infinite material‘ (An Informal History ofthe German Language, Cambridge 1965, p. ~ i i ) . ~ ~ This is what Wells (and Keller) have done for us. For all its ‘leading- edge’ scholarship, HSK Sprachgeschzchte remains nothing more than a collection of scholarly essays, some of which, precisely because of this aspect, may quickly date: the reader is not taken through them by any sympathetic guide: guidance is left to emerge from the arrangement of articles and a cross-reference to all the works of bibliography consulted which appear placed together in an index at the end of Tei12.2 (‘Verfasserregister’), along with a ‘Sachregister’. But what of the student who requires quick reference to the salient points of the High German Sound Shift? The ‘Sachregister’ under ‘Hochdt. Lautverschiebung’ refers us to p. 1756, but there is nothing on this page except a general dis- cussion of the divisions between O H G and Old Saxon. Instead, then, we look up ‘Lautverschiebungen, germ. u. ahd., Vergleich’ on p. 955. Fortunately this is still within Ted 2.2, so we do not have to grasp for the other hefty volume, but when we do actually find the reference (on p. 957, as it happens), the description is hardly far-reaching (2 pages) and scarcely to be compared favourably with Wells’s Appendix A, Keller’s pp. 167-77, Priebsch-Collinson’s pp. 110-27, or Waterman’s pp. 56-64. Searching HSK Sprachgeschichte for detail on the First Sound Shift, one fares no better; nor does a search through the index for the basic ideas behind Umlaut and Ablaut reveal much at this level. What we do find, however, is a great deal of scholarly reference which takes for granted an already-present and excellent grasp of these matters. Clearly, then, HSK Sprachgeschichte is a work for the advanced scholar, and as such is excellent for German university students, or English research Germanists, but as Waterman remarks generally of the USA, ‘most students. . .simply do not have the historical, cultural and linguistic background quite naturally taken for granted by, . .German authors’ (op. cit . , viii). T o those who would say that a single person can nowadays scarcely be the infallible repository of all the scholar- ship which is available, we must temper their comment by pointing out the difficulty that any one man would have in adequateiy being able to write consistently ‘leading-edge’ criticism of all the articles in a ‘Sammelband’ such

178 C . J . WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN

as H S K Spruchgeschichte: this collection has even needed three editors, not just the one felt sufficient by its forerunners, i.e. Wolfgang Stammler’s Deutsche Philoiogie im A u j $ Berlin 1957-69, and Hermann Paul’s GrundriJ dergennanischen Philologie, 1891. And whereas the contributions to Paul’s Grundrg were all eventually published as volumes in their own right, H S K Spruchgeschichte has not reached that stage yet, even if such a stage is planned, and remains unwieldy in its two huge volumes. There is still room therefore for a guidebook which takes students step by step through the history of the language, and familiarises them at the same time with the various linguistic theories applicable to the historical study of German. Where it also points out areas as yet under- researched, it is particularly welcome.34 Max Miiller once remarked, ‘declen- sions and conjugations cannot be made amusing’,35 so Wells must be con- gratulated also for compensating us so amply with much that is readable concerning the ‘aufiere Gechichte’ of German. German readers too can now benefit from Wells’s approach, for in 1989 his text appeared in translation in Niemeyer’s Reihe Germunistische Linguistik, as Volume 93, under the title of Deutsch: eine Sprachgeschichte bis 1945. It is a pity, however, in some ways, that no history of German which has so far appeared in English has ever followed the pattern set by Barbara M . H . Strang‘s A H i s t o 9 OfEnglish (LondonINew York 1970),36 and organised the material to run from modern to ancient. Given the changing attitudes of university students, this might better appeal to them. Wells too (cf. Introduction, footnote 45) describes Strang’s work a ‘successful and stimulating’ attempt ‘to break the tracing back to archetypal reconstructions’. Is this the real way ahead for linguistic histories of German?

NOTES

‘ John B. Carroll (ed.), Language, Thought and Reality, selected wrifings of Benjamin Lee Whor j 5th edition, Massachusetts 1962, p. 21 1.

* Franz Bopp (Mainz 1791-Berlin 1867). Veber dac conjugafionrsysfem ah sanskrifsprache in uergleichung mif jcnem der griechischen, la feinischm, persischen und gnmanischen sprache. Herausgegreben und mit uorerin- nnung begleifef uon Dr. K . J. Windischmann, Frankfurt a .M. ’ Rasmus Rask ( 1 787-1832), Undersagelse om def gamle nordiske eller islandse sprogs oprindelse.

Copenhagen 18 18.

’ Cf. Schleicher (Professor, Prague 1850-7, Jena 1857-68), op. tit., 1860, p. v: ‘die vorliegende Schrift , . . (ist). . .so gethan, dal3 sie zur Kraftigung des deutschen Nationalgefuhles. . . beitragt’.

Scherer, op. c i f . , 1868, p. X I I I : ‘Die Entstehung unserer Nation, von einer besonderen Seite angesehen, macht den Hauptvorwurf des gegenwartigen Buches aus.’

Von Raurner (1815-76; Professor, Erlangen, 1840-76), op. c i f . , p. VI: ‘Die herrlichen deutschen Siege, durch deutsche Einigkeit, Tapferkeit und Einsicht unter Cottes Beistand errungen, zeugen dafur, dal3 unser Volk noch in voller Kraft steht. Gott wolle unsre Waffen ferner segnen!’

Hirt (1865-1936; Professor, Giessen, 1912-30), op. c i t , , 1919, p. VII: ‘Da ich dem Vaterlande nicht rnehr mit der Waffe dienen konnte, so glaubte ich auch eine Art von Pflicht zu erfullen, wenn ich dieses fur den Lehrer dringend notwendige Buch schrieb.’

Bach (Professor, Bonn, 1927-56), op. c i t , , 1938, p. 234: ‘Der Kampf um Bestand und Reinheit unserer Muttersprache ist daher - wie der Kampf urn die Reinheit der Rasse - ein Ringen um den Bestand. die Einheit und den Geist unseres Volks in der Zukunft.’

C. J . WELLS AND HISTORIES O F GERMAN 179

Joachim Heinrich Campe (1 746-1818), and Theodor Bernd, Worferbuch dcr Deutschm Sprache, Braunschweig 1807-11, I, p. XXII .

28 July 1870. War had been declared on 19 July; cf. Scherer’s words, Deutschc Grammatik, Berlin 1870, p. XXI: ‘Diese wiBenschaft (s ic) ist gebaut aufdas reinste, edelste, heiligste gefiihl, das einen menschen erfiillen kann, auf die liebe zu der geistigen gemeinschaft, der e r entstammt, auf die liebe zu seiner nation.’ ’ Friedrich Max Miiller (1823-1900) was a native of Dessau, son of the poet Wilhelm Miiller

(1794-1827) and grandson of Prasident von Basedow, prime minister of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau. His godfather was Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), whose main character in D n Freischiitz furnished the name Max, which in England came to be regarded as part of his surname (Max- Miiller). In May 1848 he settled in Oxford, remaining there for the rest of his life. Through Baron Bunsen, the Prussian minister in London, Max Miiller became a personal friend of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, eventually being summoned to the Privy Council in 1896 for ‘his great service to philological science in this country’. Cf. Nirad C . Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The L q e of Professor the R f . Hon. Friedrich M a r Mii l ln, P . C., London 1974.

A. Schleicher, Die Daminkche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschafi. Offmes Schreiben an E . Hackel, 2nd edition, Weimar 1873.

’ H. Osthoff and K . Brugmann, Morphologische Unfersuchungen a u f d o n Gebiete d n indogmanischm Sprache, Leipzig 1878. The term ‘Junggrammatiker’ is taken from the preface of this work. lo A Yorkshireman with no formal learning up to the age of fifteen, Wright had been inspired to learn German by talk he heard at work of the Franco-Prussian War. He counted Brugmann, whose Grundrg der uergleichendcn Grammafik der indogermanischen Sprachm, I , Strasbourg 1886, he had translated into English (Comparatiuc Grammar of the Indogmanic Languages, London 1888), as one of his chief supporters. Cf. E. M. Wright, TheSfory ofJoseph Wrighf, man andscholar, London 1934.

I ’ Cf. C . H . Firth, Modern Languages at Oxford 1724-1929, Oxford 1929, p. 42: ‘A common cause of complaint was that [the modern languages scholarships] were too often gained by men whose birth or foreign upbringing gave them unfair advantage in competing with ordinary British undergraduates. It was partly to meet this that the Curators resolved in 1868 that philology should always form a prominent part in the examination, and they maintained this preference for philology in answer to an inquiry from Council in 1881. The early literature of the language offered also had an important place in the papers.’ I‘ These included The German Classicsfrom the Fourfh f o the finctcenth Cenfury, London 1858.

l 3 After Schleicher, op. c i f . , 1860, one of the latest texts was Wilhelm Scherer’s Zur Gcschichte d n dcufschm Sprache, ed. cif. Ernst Forstemann (1822-1906; Chief Librarian, Royal Library, Dresden), Geschichfe des dcufschen Sprachsfammes (Nordhausen) would follow in 1874, and Heinrich Ruckert (1823-75, Professor, Breslau), Gcschichte d n Neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprachc (Leipzig) in 1875. Grimm’s own Geschichfe der dcutschm Sprache (1848) was so full of ethnology rather than linguistic history that Hirt, op. c i t . , 1919, p. V I I , describes it as ‘ein geistreiches Buch, aber nur kein Buch, das dem Titel entsprache’. I‘ Herbert Augustus Strong M.A., LL.D. (1844-1918) was from 1882 to 1909 Professor of Latin, University College, Liverpool. H e translated some notable works of scholarship from German to English, chief amongst which was that of the ‘Junggrammatiker’ Hermann Paul, Principim d n Sprachgeschichte, Halle 1880, translated as Principles Offhe History of Language, London 1888. Strong later reworked this with others, and it appeared as Infroducfion to the Sfudy of the History OfLanguage. London 1891. Kuno Meyer, Ph.D. (s ic) , b. Hamburg 1858, d. Leipzig 1919, was Lecturer on Teutonic Languages at University College, Liverpool, where in 1908 he was also appointed to the honorary Chair of Celtic and gained honorary D.Litts from the Universities of Wales, Oxford and St. Andrews before moving to the Chair of Celtic in Berlin in 1911. From there he was reappointed to the Liverpool Chair in 1912, and lectured at the University during 1913. In December 1914, however, Meyer’s reputation in Britain fell to a low ebb when he wrote to the Vice-Chancellor at Liverpool (from the USA, where he spent the rest of the war), announcing that ‘he would give the remainder of his Celtic lectures when England was conquered’. Later, he also wrote and spoke freely in support of the Irish rebels. (Cf. T. Kelly, For Aduancmenf of Learning, The Uniunsiy of

180 C . J. WELLS AND HISTORIES OF GERMAN

Liverpool 1881-1981, Liverpool 1981, p. 174, and S. Wallace, War and fhe Imagcof Gemany, Brifish Acadrmics 1914-1918, Edinburgh 1988, p. 40.)

l 5 Cf. R . Priebsch and W. E. Collinson, The German Language, London 1934, p. xiii. The series had begun in 1888, with Wright’s Old High German Rimer and Middle High German

Rimer, which were subsequently reprinted many times. I’ Kluge’s standpoint was the same as Grimm’s: ‘Die folgenden Bogen vertreten im wesentlichen den Standpunkt Jacob Grimm’s, dab unsere Schriftsprache ein protestantischer Dialekt ist’ ( Von Lufher bi5 Lcssing, Vorwort).

Cf. Hermann Baltzer, Die dcutsche Sprache, Ursprung und Werdegang, Weimar 1935, p. 226: ‘Gegeniiber den zumeist tiefbrunetten und haRlichen Menschen des 17. Jahrhundens - man denke an das verkniffene Gesicht eines Gryphius, der doch als einer der genialsten Dichter jener Zeit gilt - waren die Schopfer der neuen deutschen Hochkultur im 18. Jahrhundert fast alle - in ihrer Jugend und in den Mannesjahren - schone, wohlgestaltete und zumeist auch blonde Menschen.’

Cf. The Sheffieldand Rotherham Daily Indepcndenf, 20 May 1915, p. 5: ‘Teutonic Madness - The Name of Jesus proves His German Origin! - Rotterdam, Tuesday: In a book entitled “Ein Pan Germanisches Deutschland”, Herr J . L. Reimer says: “Let us stop a moment at the name Jesus. The letters J and G being interchangeable, we obtain the name Gesus, and since, as all philologists know, the letter R often changes into S, the name of the Redeemer can also be read Gerus. Let us go a little further. Gerus equals C n plus us. This us is the Latin suffix indicating the masculine, and is the equivalent of the Teutonic termination man. So by replacing the Latin by the Teutonic suffix we get German - which is to say that the name ofJesus Christ proves His German origin.” - Central News.’ ’’ Peter von Polenz, Geschichfe d n dcufschen Sprachc, Berlin/New York 1966 (expanded and rewritten from Hans Sperber, Geschichte der deufschen Sprache, Sammlung Goschen, 1926) contains little about this aspect, though it is generally good on the ‘auRere Geschichte’. * ’ 2nd edition, 1981 ; cf. pp. 16-1 7: ‘Aber die Grundpositionen burgerlicher Sprachhistoriker konnen nicht befriedigen. Sie gehen meist von positivistischen Vorstellungen aus und vermogen die Bedingungen des gesellschaftlichen Seins, besonders die Rolle der Klassen und des Klassen- kampfs, entweder gar nicht zu erkennen oder nicht richtig einzuschatzen.’ Apart from its concen- tration on German in Germany only (even Austria is excluded), and absence of reference to all English-language sources except Waterman, Schildt does contain a great deal of information useful to students. However, his re-periodisation (our present concepts of Old High German, Middle High German, New High German date from Grimm, and Early New High German from Scherer) is a great stumbling block. (For critical appraisal of the periods of the German language, see Herbert Wolf, ‘Die Periodisierung der deutschen Sprachgeschichte’, HSK Sprachgeschichfe, I , pp. 815-23.) Amongst other socialist histories of German, one should also mention Wilhelm Schmidt (ed.), Geschichfc der deufschcn Sprache, uerfapf uon einem Auforenkollekfiu unfer Leifung uon W. S., Berlin 1969, and the work of the Russian scholars Myrrha M . Guchmann, Der Weg turdeufschen Nafionalsprachc, Berlin 1964-9, and Olga 1. Moskalskaja, Dcufsche Sprachgeschichfe, Moscow 1977.

’* Speech and writing not being present for this period, we are told a medieval phonology is a faded tapestry, the picture of which can be understood, but not the colours (p. 75) but not the less showing striking advances over the neogrammarian phonology (p. 82), notably phoneme theory. 23 W. B. Lockwood, Historical Gmnan Synfnr, Oxford 1968, p. 268; Wladimir Admoni, ‘Syntax des Neuhochdeutschen seit dem 17. Jahrhundert’, H S K Sprachgcschichfc, 11, p. 1539.

“ For an early mention of this matter, cf. Gmnan Home Lifc, by ‘A Lady’, London 1876, p. 103: ‘It could hardly be said, even by the most ardent lovers of the German language, that it is musical; and it is no uncommon thing to hear persons who neither understand nor speak it declare that i t is simply “hideous”. Perhaps they have never heard German of the best kind. Shouted at in every variety of accent and dialect - Austrian, Prussian, Saxon, Bavarian, Rhenish - it is, to say the least of it, a bewildering experience, a very Babel of Babels. But pure Hanoverian German (indeed, the German of most of the Northern States), spoken by refined lips, without rasping of the throat or muscular contortion, is far from unpleasant, whilst the language heard on the banks of the

C . J . WELLS AND HISTORIES O F GERMAN 181

Leine is in truth the lingua loscana in bocca romnu of the North.’ Hirt, op. c i f . , 1925, p. 292 remarks: ‘Es ist ja Mar, daa die Aussprache S-&in, s-prechm buchstabengetreuer ist a l s Schfein, sprechen, und insofern haben die Hannoveraner einen Schein des Rechts fur sich, wenn sie die beste Aussprache fur sich in Anspruch nehmen. Ebenso konnte man aber s-chinkm verteidigen, wie die Westfalen sagen.’ 25 p. 3 10 gives some examples: Gridick (Krifik), Biebeldick (Bibliofhek), Liedrafdur (Litnufur). 26 Uber die Einipng dn dcufschm Ausspruchc, Halle 1905, quoted by Wells as footnote 39 to Chapter IX. ” Following Socin, op. c i f . , Wells writes that ‘the Viennese dramatic critic Sonnenfels claims (in 1768) that German lacks a language of comedy precisely because there is no general Umgangsspruche - the circles which might have produced a refined language suitable for refined comedy speak French!’ (p. 318).

Actually, his wife - Chapter VIII, footnote 51: ‘Frau Gottsched told a visitor enquiring for her husband “Er ist auf der Jagd, er scheuat Hasen”’. (Lip-rounded schiCpf). 29 Cf. U. Thies, ‘Sprachvarianten im Ruhrgebiet. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie stadtsprachlicher Forschung‘, K. H . Bausch (ed.), Mehrspruchigkeif in dn SLadlregion, Dusseldorf 1981, pp. 108-48.

3o Amongst the histories of German, F. Oskar Weise’s Unsne Muftnsprachc: ihr wndm und ihr Wesm, 6th edition, Leipzig 1907, comes down squarely on the side of purism, and was even awarded a prize of R M 600 by the A l l g m i n n dcufschn Sprachvnein. Baltzer, op. c i f . , p. 243, takes it a stage further: ‘Nicht die “Verwelschung” war die groae Gefahr fur die deutsche Sprache unserer Zeit, sondern die Tatsache, daa die am meisten gelesenen, zugleich aber vorzuglich geleiteten Zeitungen und Zeitschriften in judischen Handen waren und naturgegeben judische Schriftsteller bevor- zugten . . . Da waren dann oft nur die Worte deutsch, der Sprachgeist durchaus fremd. . . Dieser Sprachton aber drang durch das tagliche Lesen der Zeitungen in die Allgemeinheit ein und auch gar nicht so wenige nichtjudische Schriftsteller nahmen ihn ihrerseits an . . . Man erinnert sich der Anekdote von dem Judenjungen, den sein Vater in ein abseitiges westfdisches Dorf brachte, damit er seinen Jargon verliere: als der Vater ihn abholte, judelte das ganze Do&. It is scarcely surprising after utterances like these that links between the language and the ‘blood’ should have become taboo, and in the time since World War I1 have only once seriously been taken up (Leonard F. Brosnahan, The Sou& OfLanguuge: an inquiv info fhe role ofgmdic jucfors in the dcvclopmmf ofsoundsysfm, Cambridge 1961). ” Goebbels Tagebiichn. Aur den Juhren 1942-43, ed. Louis Lochner, Zurich 1948.

32 Werner F. Leopold, ‘The Decline of the German Dialects’, Word, 15 (1959), 30-53; ‘Die Mundarten bei Fluchtlingen in Westdeutschland’, Language, 37 (1961), 509-21.

33 Lockwood’s study places more value on the modern textual variants of Germanic than either Wells or Keller does, but he begins at the O H G period and omits Indo-European and the First Sound Shift. ’’ The English-language single-volume ‘Sammelband’, The Dialects of Modem C m n , A Linguisfic Survcy, ed. C. V. J. Russ, London 1990, must similarly be contrasted with the one-man studies of R. E. Keller, The GmMn Dialects, Manchester 1961, and C . A. M. Noble, M o h GmMn Dialects, New York 1983. Unlike Wells, all examples and texts in The Dialecfs ofModern Gmnan are glossed into NHG and English. 35 Lectures on Science and Language, 6th edition, London 1871, p. 2

36 Barbara Mary Hope Strang (1925-82), Professor of English Language and General Linguistics, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1964-82.

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