Old High German
The eventual disruption of these patterns, which led to the more analytic grammar, are generally considered to mark the transition to Middle High German.
Surviving Old High German texts were all composed in monastic scriptoria, so the overwhelming majority of them are religious in nature or, when secular, belong to the Latinate literary culture of Christianity.
The earliest instances, which date to the latter half of the 8th century, are glosses—notes added to margins or between lines that provide translation of the (Latin) text or other aid to the reader.
[1][2] The start of this period sees the beginning of the OHG written tradition, at first with only glosses, but with substantial translations and original compositions by the 9th century.
This area did not become German-speaking until the German eastward expansion ("Ostkolonisation", "Ostsiedlung") of the early 12th century, though there was some attempt at conquest and missionary work under the Ottonians.
[13] The Alemannic polity was conquered by Clovis I in 496, and in the last twenty years of the 8th century Charlemagne subdued the Saxons, the Frisians, the Bavarians, and the Lombards, bringing all continental Germanic-speaking peoples under Frankish rule.
Broadly speaking, the main dialect divisions of Old High German seem to have been similar to those of later periods—they are based on established territorial groupings and the effects of the Second Sound Shift, which have remained influential until the present day.
But because the direct evidence for Old High German consists solely of manuscripts produced in a few major ecclesiastical centres, there is no isogloss information of the sort on which modern dialect maps are based.
Claims that this might have been the language of the Carolingian court or that it is attested in the Ludwigslied, whose presence in a French manuscript suggests bilingualism, are controversial.
The dedication to the preservation of Old High German epic poetry among the scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance was significantly greater than could be suspected from the meagre survivals we have today (less than 200 lines in total between the Hildebrandslied and the Muspilli).
Thus, it was Charlemagne's weak successor, Louis the Pious, who destroyed his father's collection of epic poetry on account of its pagan content.
Towards the end of the Old High German period, Notker Labeo was among the greatest stylists in the language, and developed a systematic orthography.
This shift led to considerable variations in spelling conventions, as individual scribes and scriptoria had to develop their own transliteration of sounds not native to Latin script.
Latin: arborem fici habebat quidam plantatam (Luke 13:6)[32][33]In time, however, these endings fell out of use and the participle came to be seen no longer as an adjective but as part of the verb, as in Modern German.
Inti nu uuirdist thu suigenti' (Tatian 2,9) "And now you will start to fall silent" Latin: Et ecce eris tacens (Luke 1:20)[37] The present tense continued to be used alongside these new forms to indicate future time (as it still is in Modern German).
Any description of OHG syntax faces a fundamental problem: texts translated from or based on a Latin original will be syntactically influenced by their source,[39] while the verse works may show patterns that are determined by the needs of rhyme and metre, or that represent literary archaisms.
[45] These developments are generally seen as mechanisms to compensate for the loss of morphological distinctions which resulted from the weakening of unstressed vowels in the endings of nouns and verbs (see above).
Consequently, the majority of Old High German texts are religious in nature and show strong influence of ecclesiastical Latin on the vocabulary.
