A comparison between English and German and their ancestors Old English, Old High and Old Low German

 

 

Contents

 

1. Introduction 2

1. Structure of this paper 2

2. Main part: A comparison between English and German and their ancestors 3

Old English, Old High and Old Low German

2.1 A survey of the historical background of the speakers of Old Saxon, Old 3

English, Old High and Old Low German

2.2 Linguistic evidences of a close relationship between these languages 4

2.3 In how far can this close connection of language still be seen in Modern 9

English and German?

3. Conclusion 12

4. Bibliography 13

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Introduction

1.1. In how far are English and German related?

English and German both belong to the Indo-European language family. They are both assigned to the Germanic group and even both belong to the West Germanic branch of the language tree. Nevertheless they are quite different. English and its ancestor Old English are members of the Anglo-Frisian group together with Frisian and its earlier form which is called Old Frisian, whereas German belongs to the Proto-German group which is also called the Netherlandic-German group. The German language is subdivided in High and Low German. While High German is the official language of Germany, Low German is regarded as a dialect of it which is still spoken in the northern part of Germany. Both are important for the history of language because they gave birth to languages which are still spoken today. Modern High German sprang from Old High German as well as Yiddish, and Old Low German developed not only into the Low German of today but also into Dutch and Afrikaans.

 

1.2. Structure of this paper

In the following parts of this turn paper I would like to show on the one hand the different ways in which English and German developed and on the other in how far there are still similarities between them. At first I will give a short summary of the history which led to the development of Old English, Old High and Old Low German. Further on I would like to go into linguistics and show similarities and differences between these languages. From time to time I will compare the English development with that of Low German because both share similarities which do not exist in High German. The reason for that is that Old High German in contrast to Old English, Old Low German, Old Frisian and Old Dutch did not have an Ingveonic (i.e. language phenomena which appeared at the North Sea coast) character. At the end of the main part of this paper I want to show in how far the close connection between Old English and Old High/Old Low German can still be seen.

2. Main part: A comparison between English and German and their ancestors Old English, Old High and Old Low German

2.1. A survey of the historical background of the speakers of Old Saxon, Old English, Old High and Old Low German

The Saxons were a warlike tribe that inhabited the German North Sea coast to the east of the lower Elbe in what is today Schleswig-Holstein. Their tribe consisted of several tribes and it is assumed that this was also seen in the language which had on the one hand an Ingveonic and on the other hand a more inner German character.

Since the beginning of the 5^th century Saxons from the region between the lower Elbe and the Weser made their way to the British coast together with Angles from Schleswig and settled in the south and east of the British island. The English father of the church, Beda Venerabilis, speaks in his book `Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum' in chapter 1, page 15 of the legendary Saxon leaders Hengest and Horsa who were invited by the British king to come and brought Angles and Jutes (a tribe whose home is assumed to have been in Denmark) with them. The English place-names Wessex, Sussex and Essex are remnants of this time. According to Mitchell 1995, 13 it is not clear whether "the migrants came in large numbers and drove out the Celtic-speaking inhabitants into Wales, where many of their descendants still speak Welsh, and Cornwall, where Cornish was spoken until c. 1800" or if it is not as well possible that "there was no mass migration but only a seizure of power by a new ruling elite who imposed their Germanic culture and language on the Celts".

However, the Anglo-Saxons brought a Germanic language to England and this language with its differences caused the development of the four main dialects of Old English which are Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West-Saxon. Under King Alfred who ruled from 871 to 899 the West- Saxon dialect became the standard language of England.

On the continent language developed in a different way. What is now Germany was not only inhabited by the Saxon tribe but also by Franks who lived all over France and in the western part of Germany and led several wars against the Saxons. At the North Sea coast of Germany and the Netherlands settled Frisians and the southern part of Germany was inhabited by Alamanni, Bavarians and Thuringians. These groups were important in the formation of German dialects.

Before going more into detail it is important to know that Germany was divided into two parts, the northern one where people spoke Low German dialects which were descendants of Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian and the southern one where Old High German was spoken. It consisted of different Frankish dialects. The boundary between these areas lay between Dortmund and Cologne in the west and Magdeburg and Erfurt in the east. This line was an isogloss, which means that it separated areas where the same word was pronounced differently. Therefore it is also called the `maken/machen' line because the German word for "make" is pronounced with [k] in the dialects spoken to the north of the line, and with [x] (as in German "ach") to the south of it.

 

2.2 Linguistic evidences of a close relationship between these languages

English and German are not mutually intelligible due to the fact that they are different languages. Nevertheless they are not that dissimilar. The Low German sentence He swamm in dat deepe Water can be easily understood by a speaker of English who would say He swam in the deep water. The High German version is a bit more incongruous to that: Er schwamm in dem tiefen Wasser. This difference derives from the Second Consonant Shift which - different to the First or Germanic Consonant Shift that "split off the prehistoric ancestor of the Germanic languages from the rest of the Indo-European languages" and was first formulated by the philologist Jacob Grimm and later on more specialised by the Danish linguist Karl Verner - occurred in none of the Germanic languages but Old High German and is therefore also called High German Consonant shift. The following table will illustrate the differences it caused:

Old English	Modern English	Old Low German	Modern Low German	Old High German	Modern High German
etan	eat	etan	eten	e an	essen
stan	stone	sten	Steen	stein	Stein
slæpan	sleep	slapan	slapen	slafan	schlafen
scip	ship	scip	Schipp	scif	Schiff
ic	I	ik	ik	ih	ich

The table below will generalise the differences which were caused by that sound shift:

High German (shifted)			Low German (unshifted)
after fricative (i.e. */s/, */f/, */h/)	initially; after consonant other than Germanic fricative; in gemination	medially between vowels; finally	Â
/t/	/ts/	/s/	/t/
/p/	/pf/	/f/	/p/
/k/	[k], [kx], [x] dialectally	/x/	/k/

There are more language phenomena that English and Low German share. As I already pointed out in the introduction, they both have an Ingveonic character. The problem with Ingveonic (which is also called North Sea Germanic) is, that it is not clearly defined what this term stands for. It is usually used for language phenomena which occur at the coast but it is quite flexible used regarding time and place. Moreover it does not belong to a certain tribe but appears in nearly all regions close to the North Sea coast and its intensity gets more and more lost the farther one moves inland away from the sea. Nevertheless I will use this term here because there are round about twenty Ingveonic characteristics shared by Old English, Old Frisian, Old Dutch and Old Low German. For example, all of them show a high similarity regarding the masculine third person pronoun in the nominative singular:

Old Low German Old English Old Dutch Old Frisian

he he/he he/hie hi/he

The dissimilarity to the Old High German form for this pronoun `er' is obvious. Moreover Old Low German, Old Dutch, Old English and Old Frisian show the same rule in forming the plural. In all these languages there is only one form for the first, second and third person plural (e.g. English: we have, you have, they have; Low German: wi hebbt, ji hebbt, se hebbt; in contrast to High German: wir haben, ihr habt, sie haben). An Ingveonic phenomenon which is even more striking is the loss of nasals before voiceless fricatives (/ƒ/, /h/, /s/). It is assumed that before the nasals were dropped the following vowels were nasalized. Later on this nasalization of the vowels changed into a lengthening as it can be seen in Old English, Old Frisian and Old Low German fif `five' which is funf/finf in High German. The same contrast is shown by comparing the Old English words for `goose' and `other' with the Old High German ones: Old English: gos, oþer; Old High German: gans, andar. There is one more Ingveonic phenomenon which I would like to mention. In words where /k/ was followed by /i/ the /k/ was slightly palatized. This can be seen in the Old English words ciese (`cheese'), cinn (`chin'), cild (`child') and circe (`church'). As one can see, the palatization of the Old English words gave way to the modern affricative /c/. In Low German this is a bit different. There the palatization took place, too, as words like antkiennien (German: `erkennen', English: `recognise', folcsciepe (German: `Völkerschaft', English: `community of nations') and kiesur (German: `Kaiser', English: `emperor') which were found in texts of the 10^th century prove. But this phenomenon got lost in written records of Middle Low German (although it is assumed that it occurred much longer in the spoken form of Low German) and so today there are only some occasional forms like Ütze (German: `Kröte', English: `toad' and Sewer (German: `Käfer', English: `bug') still existent.

Another factor for similarities between Old English and Old Low German is the influence of church. There is a high correspondence between Old English and Old Low German terms like Old English god-spell (meaning `good news') and Old Low German godspell (meaning `gospel'). Other paradigms for this are Old English boccræft (`literature') and its Old Low German cognate bokkraft (`learnedness').

Now I would like to compare English and German syntax. In Germanic and probably in West-Germanic, too, all forms were characterised by inflectional endings. A paradigm for this would be the declination of the Old English word stan `stone':

Singular Plural

Nom. stan stanas

Acc. stan stanas

Gen. stanes stana

Dat. stane stanum

This inflexion system was very important for Old English because it allowed a free word order as it is shown in the following sentences all meaning `the man slew the king':

Se man sloh þone kyning. (SVO)

þone kyning se man sloh. (OVS)

Se man þone kyning sloh. (SOV)

þone kyning the man sloh. (OSV)

Sloh se man þone kyning. (VSO)

Sloh þone kyning se man. (VOS)

In Modern English only the first two versions would be alright although the second one would probably be misunderstood as `the king slew the man' because today SVO is the only possible and correct word order. Sentences in which the verb is in first position are nowadays only possible as questions although Modern English questions are build with no other verbs as `do' or `have'. However, according to Mitchell it is assumed that "Old English was clearly moving towards the SVO order" and sentences like þas ealdan guman fundon þa hwitan oxan are usually interpreted as `These old man found the white oxen' and not vice versa which is also possible as the former example has shown. The different Germanic languages have carried out the development towards SVO at different rates. English and the Scandinavian languages have gone the farthest, German less far. The reason for that could be that German did not abolish the case system which in the earlier languages served to distinguish subjects and objects. So the English sentence: `An old woman gave an apple to a little girl' can be expressed in several ways in German:

1. Eine alte Frau gab einem kleinen Mädchen einen Apfel. (SVOO)

2. Einem kleinen Mädchen gab eine alte Frau einen Apfel. (OVSO)

3. Einen Apfel gab eine alte Frau einem kleinen Mädchen. (OVSO)

4. Es gab eine Frau einem kleinen Mädchen einen Apfel. (VSOO)

Regarding English and German morphology, one notices once again that German is basically an inflectional language. While English has regular and irregular noun plurals (usually -s, but also child - children, mouse - mice) German has not (Vater - Väter, Stadt - Städte, Frau - Frauen, Kuli - Kulis). "Here [in German] all the declension patterns basically have equal status - as, incidentally, was the case in Old English and Old High German". But nevertheless Old English and Old High German underwent different sound changes. In Old English for example the medial /x/ was lost, palatalization took place (cf. p.6) and the quantity of vowels was changed by lentghening or shortening them. A phenomenon that both languages show is i-umlaut but whereas Old High German preserved umlaut as regular and phonetically transparent Old English disrupted this transparency. The reason for that is the Old English unrounding of the front round vowel. That means that /œ/ became /e/ and /ü/ became /i/ or /u/ or /e/ depending on dialect. In later language periods English ablaut nouns were gradually replaced and ablaut verbs became irregularities or were shifted towards the regular weak class, so that the former correct past form of `help' which was `holp'was changed into `helped', whereas in German ablaut forms stayed.

 

2.3 In how far can this close connection of language still be seen in Modern English and German?

In Modern English and German lexical similarities are obvious. They can be easily traced back to the older forms of both languages as the table below shows:

English	Old English	German	Old High German
man	man	Mann	man
mouse	mus	Maus	mus
sing	singan	singen	singan
father	fœder	Vater	fater

Some words that seem similar in English and German have got different meanings (e.g. knight - Knecht `servant' or hound - Hund `dog'). The word knight meant `youth' in older periods of English. In German it was the same, the Old High German word for `Knecht' was `knëcht' and its meaning was `boy' or `young man'. But during the centuries the English meaning of this word was changed for the age of chivalry.

Apart from semantics there is also grammatical correspondence between both languages, e.g. in the ways in which Modern English and German built the comparative and the superlative forms of adjectives:

English German

thick dick

thicker dicker

thickest (am) dickst(en)

This is not only the case in regular adjectives. The irregularities show the same correspondences:

English German

good gut

better besser

best (am) best(en)

Grammatical correspondence is also shown in the verb system. Not only the ways of forming the past tense of regular words are similar, even some irregular verbs are formed in similar ways. Moreover both languages show umlaut, although English umlaut is irregular (cf. p.8). The following list illustrates these points:

English German

laugh - laughed lachen - lachte

hate - hated hassen - hasste

love - loved lieben - liebte

think - thought denken - dachte

bring - brought bringen - brachte

sing - sang - sung singen - sang - gesungen

give - gave - given geben - gab - gegeben

fall - fell - fallen fallen - fiel - gefallen

Despite all these similarities Modern English seems somewhat "more progressive" than Modern German as Kastovsky calls it. The reason for that is that it has simplified its inflexional system, as all Germanic languages did to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless this is the reason why Modern English differs so radically from the language type still presented by Old English and Old High German.

Low German shall not be left out in this chapter. The problem with it is that there is hardly any literature dealing with English and Low German correspondences. But from my point of view there are some similarities between these two languages. As I already mentioned, both did not undergo the Second Consonant Shift. So at least referring to pronunciation they are often similar (English `ship' is not far from Low German `Schipp' for example and it is nearly the same with `water' and `Water'). But sometimes it is just the other way round so that the pronunciation is different but the writing and even the meaning is the same (cf.: Low German `just' with the j pronounced as /j/ like `yes' in contrast to English `just', both meaning `exactly'; it is the same with Low German `jumpen' and English `jump'). However, in my opinion most people do not see these correspondences because they do not know Low German or vice versa many speakers of Low German do not recognise that their dialect is similar to English because many of them - especially old people who are the majority of speakers of Low German - do not know English.

 

 

 

3. Conclusion

As Robinson puts it "English and German are two divergent developments of some originally unified language". With this turn paper I tried to show in how far similarities between both languages still can be seen. Furthermore it was my intention to give the reader a survey on the different ways and stages of development in English and German so that he or she is able to understand that `eat' and `essen' are not so dissimilar as they seem to be at first sight. In my opinion Low German serves in many cases as a kind of `missing link' between High German and English. I usually found it easier to translate an Old English word into a Modern German one when I thought of a Low German cognate. I think the reason for that is the Second Consonant Shift which did neither occur in English nor in Low German. Unfortunately most linguists do not feel alike as it seems because I did not find a single book which was dedicated to a comparison between Old English and Old Low German similarities...

So I decided to take as many books as possible for basis information about Old English, Old High and Old Low German and tried to make up a comparison between all three of them by myself with the help of all those little bits of information I picked out of those books. The problem was to decide between necessary and unnecessary information, so some paragraphs of this paper may seem a bit chaotic with regard to their inner structure. Nevertheless I hope that those ones are not of so high consequence on the whole and that this paper is interesting and understandable in spite of that.

 

September 1998

Regina Schuchardt

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

• Baugh, A./Cable T.: A history of the English language, 4^th edition, London 1993

• Bynon, Theodora: Historical linguistics, Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne, 1977

• Fromkin, Viktoria/Rodman, Robert: An introduction to language, 5^th edition, New York 1993

• Kastovsky, Dieter: Typological differences between English and German morphology and their causes in: Swan, Toril; Mørck, Endre; Westvik, Olaf Jansen (editors): Language change and language structure: older Germanic languages in a comparative perspective, Berlin, New York 1994

• Mitchell, Bruce: An invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford 1995

• Robinson, Orrin W.: Old English and its closest relatives: a survey of the earliest Germanic languages, London 1992

• Scargill, M. H.: Notes on the development of the principal sounds of Indo-European through Proto-Germanic and West-Germanic into Old English, London 1951

• Sanders, Willy: Sachsensprache, Hansesprache, Plattdeutsch: sprachgeschichtliche Grundzüge des Niederdeutschen, Göttingen 1982

• Wasserzieher, Ernst: Woher? Ableitendes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 16^th edition, Bonn 1963

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