Low German

Written by Blackkdark on 15th December 2007

This is my final paper for the class I took: The History of the German Language.

"You can never step in the same river twice." A philosopher, named Heraclitus, once said something similar to this. He is basically saying that the river is always changing, so when you step into it a second time, it’s changed from the way it originally was. The river in this case is a metaphor for Language. Languages always change and we can often see evidence of it in written contexts, or we can see it in fragments of the languages we know. German has had a rich history, with a major change, which would make High German completely different from its Northern counterparts. This language shift, known as the High German Consonant Shift, affected all the Southern regions down into Italy. However, the focus of this, Low German (Plattdeutsch abbreviated PD) did not go through this change.

The Low German area had the people known as the Saxons. A group of the Saxon people moved to England, and became the Anglo-Saxons (AS). The Saxon homeland reached into southern Denmark, into modern Netherlands, and all along Northern Germany into Modern Poland. During the time of Old High German (Althochdeutsch AHD), it is known as Old Saxon (Altsaksisch). In the texts from this era, such as Heliand, Credo, and Wermsegen, we can see that, even though their Southern counterparts were shifting their sounds, they themselves remained similar to their more ancestral forms. The Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law was a sound shift that did affect Old Saxon though. This law says that in the case of a vowel + a nasal + a fricative, the speakers would drop the nasal, resulting a vowel + fricative form. Several northern West Germanic languages/dialects had this happen. An example might be PD fiev, AS fíf, and HD fünf, or another one might be PD/AS ūs and HD uns. Old Saxon developed into Middle Low German. This was a lingua franca of the North and Baltic sea areas. This promoted its prestige in the Hanseatıc League, which was an important guild trade alliance. But as the league’s power diminished, so did the use of Middle Low German. It was part of a dialect paradigm that stretched throughout the Netherlands, and merged with Middle Dutch, and then moved into Denmark.

In the more modern period, Low Saxon began to decline in usage. Since the High German forms became more predominant, and with that the usage of Standards in the Early New High German time period like Lutheran. Then mass media, mass printing, and expanded schooling systems lead to the spread of the growing standard forms of German, and reduced the use of smaller pocketed "dialectal" languages such as Low German. In recent years, there has been movements to preserve Low German we have. It is still alive and well, but it is beginning to suffer the same problems that many Native American languages have suffered. This being that the younger generation would rather learn the standard language, and the older language is being forgot to the elderly people of that society. Many parents, although they speak to each other in Low German, they have a tendency to speak to their children in the standard High German. This is because they are under the impression (and several other communities worldwide have this linguistic misconception) that speaking to their children in Low Saxon and High German would make the children have a hard time in school. Over time, as more and more parents do this, less and less children learn Low German, and it might die out as a separate language due to it. There are some movements which have begun to spring up, which are aimed at preserving Low German. There are some problems with trying to do that. One being that Low German has no standard orthography. It is sometimes very hard to unite a people with their language, if they do not have a standard written form. It’s also hard to teach a language in schools if there is no specific written system. This would lead to disorganization, and much variation in spelling.

There are many different dialects of Low German, but it’s split into two major sections; West Low German and East Low German. Some consider Dutch to be a variant of Low German or the other way around, due to the similar grammar, pronunciation and lack of sound changes. It should be recognized as perhaps the closest relative to Low German, but having a national status, a French influence from the west, standard pronunciation and orthography, we can separate them out as different languages. Also one might need to wonder whether or not Old Saxon is a dialect or a separate language. The West Low German dialect has Westphalian, Eastphalian, North Low Saxon, and East Frisian Low Saxon. The East Low German dialect includes Mecklenburgisch-Vorpommersch, Brandenburgisch, East Pomeranian, Low Prussian, and Plaudietsch. These are only the ones in North Germany, and there are a good few in the Netherlands, as well as a few in Sweden and Denmark.

In order to understand how Low German is different from High German, we must understand that Low German did not go through the High German Consonant Shift, except for one stage of the shift. The HGCS has four primary stages. The first would be the shift from the voiceless stops /p t k/ to their corresponding fricatives in the same location of the mouth /f s x/. We call this consonant weakening, and it happened between vowels (being that it was not geminated) and after vowels at the ends of words. The second phase of the shift involves the same three stops /p t k/ shift to the affricates /pf ts / (/kx/) in initial position, when geminated, and surrounding liquids and nasals. The final shift, /kx/ only occurred in the highest of High German dialects. The third shift involved the three voiced stops /b d g/ becoming devoiced to /(p) t (k)/. The shift from /d/ to /t/ was the only one that survived into standard High German. The fourth phase which actually did affect Low German and Dutch. This involves the interdental fricatives /θ ð/ both becoming /d/. English did not have this shift, and thusly still retains both of those sounds. Low German we see, only participates in the last part of the shift, and we can now see how these two languages could be so completely different. So we can see some similar lexicon between the languages, but they differ by those slightly different sounds. English, like Low German also did not participate in any of the sounds shifts. Here is a simple chart showing some of the similar lexical items:

The grammar is a slightly different story as it is. Low German grammar has been simplified over time into a grammar which not as strictly held up the way that High German is. Its relatives of Dutch and English, and even more distant ones of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, all have had simplified grammars, and did not preserve the endings that we see in German or other languages which held so many archaic endings. In Low German, just as it is in Dutch and Norwegian, the masculine and feminine genders pretty much merged together. There are two forms of the definite article in Low Saxon: There is De in plural and singular, and Dat which is the neuter gender of nouns. The noun morphology has also been simplified. There are not as many declensions as there once had been and is in natural German. The endings do change in the Genitive case, but no differently than the Genitive case affects Modern English words today. Most of the other Endings have merged into the stem, though it is likely to still have vowel changes in the plural, and it does have different plural marks, just as in its Higher counterpart. The verbal endings can be connected to Anglo-Saxon fairly easily. The regular endings for both look like the following:

If we take for account the fact that the <þ> was shifted to <d>, then we can see how the endings are very similar. We can also see major differences in the plural from High German, since we don‘t have the same –en endings we normally see in Dutch and German.

We can see how important Low German is to the study of the Germanic languages, since this is a little pocket of what German might have been, what it could have become, and what it might see arise again. It is a language that is constantly changing, just as all languages are. We can learn much about it because of it‘s change, as well as the lack of change.

Bibliography

Waterman, John T. The History of the German Language. Washington, University of Washington Press, 1991.

"Moinmoin, Leeve Lü" Taken December 4^th, 2007. Plattmaster. http://www.plattmaster.de/startenglish.htm

"Low German" Zuletzt am 4. Dezember 2007 geändert. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German

Hawkins, John, "German." The World’s Major Languages. Ed. Bernard Comrie. New York, NY Oxford University Press, 1990

Atherton, Mark. Teach Yourself Old English. Coventry, England, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.: 2006.

Low German

Submitted by dallon.dama on Mon, 28/09/2009 - 06:12.

Thanks for the informative post so I want to add somethings more that German is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, loans  German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers. Standard German is widely taught in schools, universities and Goethe Institutes worldwide. It is overall the third most learned language worldwide. Some German-speaking communities can still be found in parts of the Czech Republic, Hungary, debt consolidation Poland, Romania, and above all Russia and Kazakhstan, although forced expulsions after World War II and massive emigration to Germany in the 1980s and 1990s have depopulated most of these communities. It is also spoken by German-speaking foreign populations and some of their descendants.  The dialects of German which are or were primarily spoken in colonies or communities founded by German-speaking people resemble the dialects of the regions the founders came from. For example, mortgage calculator Pennsylvania German resembles Palatinate German dialects, and Hutterite German resembles dialects of Carinthia. Texas German is a dialect spoken in the areas of Texas settled by the Adelsverein, such as New Braunfels and Fredericksburg.

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