- 7-HISTORY 'OF THE GERMAN LAN GUAGE. The Modern' German Language; as written, spoken.'on .the,, stage.. and:also,: with certain provipcial variations in the ordinary tercourse of the educated classes of the German Empire and of parts of Austria and Switzer land, is a literary language which has arisen by a'process of selection and refinement from the popular dialects formerly used in their respec tive territories and preserved even now in the natural speech of the uneducated and, to some extent, in dialectic literature. At the beginning of historical tradition these dialects, in their entirety, had certain important characteristics which justify their classification under the cont. mon head of German. They were distinguished from, though closely related to, the Frisian and the Anglo-Saxon, and together with them they constituted the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages, the other branches of which were the East Germanic, comprising Gothic, Vandalian, Burgundian, and the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, compris ing Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic. From the beginning, two main groups may be distinguished: High German and Low Ger man, the former spoken in the hilly and moun tainous midland and south, the latter in the low and level north. High German differs from Low German and from all the other Ger manic dialects chiefly by the so-called High German 'shifting of consonants, which prob ably took place between A.D. 500 and 700. By this process original d changed to t; original t, initial and after consonants (or doubled) to :or is (pronounced ts), after vowels to a sound sim ilar to r, which much later became identical with s; original p, initial and after consonants (or doubled), to Pt, after vowels to ff, f; original k, initial and after consonants (or doubled) in the extreme south only, to kch, later ch, after vowels to cit. A similar change, some times classified here, original Ns to d, began much later, but spread over the entire High and Low German territory. In consequence of these changes High German differs in its con sonants more widely from Modern English than do the Low German dialects. Examples: INGusa Low GarAmArt HIGH GRIMAN d!3,7 fiat has eine plant, Pflame water looter masses es Oafs C.0171 (charm; Alempioxiax) wake makes machos that dal das One of the chief divisions of Low German, Low Franconian, gradually separated from the other German and developed a literary language of its own, which in its modern form is called Dutch or Hollandish. Hence °Low German' is sometimes used in the more re stricted sense excluding Low Franconian. The dialects thus designated were for a long time used extensively for literary purposes, but gradually High German gained ground, and by the end of the 16th century Low German had almost ceased to be written, the people of the north adopted the common High German liter ary language for all higher purposes, and the use of the Low German dialects, in their modern form also called Plattdeutsch, was restricted to more intimate intercourse and to consciously dialectic literature. The modern literary language
has drawn upon Low German for contributions to vocabulary, notably terms relating to the sea, navigation and transtnarine commerce, but in the main it is based upon High German dialects. The latter form two groups : Middle German and Upper German. Middle German comprises Franconian (not including the Low Franconian mentioned above), and Thuringian, ' Upper Saxon, and Silesian. Upper German com prises Alemannian with its subdivisions, Swiss and Swabian, and Bavarian, which includes Austrian.
At first all the dialects ranked practically alike, every writer using the speech of his own region. There was, indeed, at first no name of national significance applied to the whole group of dialects; the word deutsch, which later came to mean °German,° denoted originally °popu lar,' and was used mainly of the language of the people as distinguished from Latin, which was the language of church, school and, to some extent, of government. This indicates the beginning of a struggle for pre-eminence be tween German and Latin which continued for many centuries and which may be characterized by a few especially important facts and dates. Religious writings in poetry and prose are found in German as as the 8th century, but for a long time the majority of them continued in Latin. About 1230 we find the first code of laws in German, the Low German Sachsenspiegel, also the first history in German, a chronicle of the world (in Low German), and the first legal documents; but for many years afterward Latin continued to be used alongside of the vernacular for all such purposes. The Reformation gave a great impetus to the use of German for all literary purposes, but even in 1570, 70 per cent of all the books printed in Germany were in Latin, and as late as 1691 more than 50 per cent. In the winter of 1687-88 Christian Thomasius gave at Leipzig, the first lectures in German in any German university. Even works of poetry were up to the 17th century mostly in Latin. By the end of the 18th century the use of Latin had become generally limited to a few branches of learning, chiefly philology and jurisprudence.