Germanic *maþl- ‘council, court of law, tribunal, popular assembly, (public) speech, verbal (interpersonal) agreement’ is clearly a central piece of institutional vocabulary, but its etymology and, hence, its further cultural associations have long remained cryptic. It is argued that there is but one formally comparable and semantically contiguous form as a conceivable source for a Gmc. *maþl-, and that is Etruscan meθlum.

Much of the rearrangement of the Latin syntax by Notker Labeo in his classroom translation/commentaries is done according to a pedagogic principle called the ordo naturalis, which prescribes an SVO word order. A theoretical discussion of the ordo naturalis is preserved in a tenth-century treatise composed at St. Gall, and its practical application is found throughout Europe in the form of glosses and construe marks. My analysis shows that Notker varied the traditional and prescribed “natural order” according to the passage at hand, taking into consideration the level of textual difficulty and pedagogic relevance of the passage as well as the text-building strategies of the original. In a few instances Notker even sprinkled his personal variant of ordo naturalis with OHG word order. Notker expanded upon and modified tradition with his own pedagogic common sense, thus tailoring his teaching materials to the needs of the St. Gall pupils.

I examine the development of for to and for in several stages of English. I argue that as prepositions grammaticalize, they acquire certain intrinsic features and occupy special positions. In Old English, for to is a P, related to Case, and has some future sense (through an extension of the locative meaning). Verbs do not subcategorize for complements with for (yet), however. In early Middle English, for to is used to introduce a complement with future meaning. Now, for (to) occupies C, which I assume is universally true for purpose/future indicators. In late Middle English, the situation solidifies, and more verbs select a complement with for (to) indicating purpose and futurity. In Early Modern English, for to disappears, but for separated from to takes over its function of introducing purposive adjuncts and future complements.

The distribution of geminates resulting from North and West Germanic consonant gemination suggests that velar obstruents were the segments most favored by the change, while r was least favored and blocked the operation altogether. In an attempt to account for this behavior, the phonetic characteristics of these sounds are examined in the context of the geminating environments. It is demonstrated that these preferences can be accounted for through coarticulatory and acoustic effects of the trigger on the preceding consonant and vice versa. Although many previous analyses have glossed over the details of consonant gemination in West Germanic, it is argued here that in order to understand sound change, coarticulation, perception, and allophonic variation must be taken into account.

During much of the Early New High German period, a small group of verbs with stem-initial g− and k− commonly formed their past participle without the prefix ge-.The standard account attributes this development to Upper German syncope. Quantitative data from a large collection of Nuremberg texts strongly suggests that this account is untenable, and a careful examination of the modern dialects shows that it is in fact the nonsyncopating Central German dialects that most strongly resemble the Early New High German situation. This paper proposes an alternative account involving inflectional haplology as the mechanism responsible for the loss of the prefix in the g-lk- verbs. This analysis answers many questions that the standard account raises, as well as explaining some striking patterns that the previous literature does not mention.

In this paper I examine the effect of the semantic relationship between an attributive genitive and its head noun on the relative ordering of the two during the ENHG period. Data were collected from five sources, all written between 1500 and 1550 by men who were natives of the city Nuremburg. Since it has been shown that personal genitives more frequently preceded the head noun, while nonpersonal genitives more often followed, the data were broken down into those two categories. It is shown that personal subjective and objective genitives are more likely to follow the head noun than personal genitives in general, while personal possessive and relational genitives are more likely to precede.

Yiddish provides a compelling argument that uvular [R] was present early in German (well before any possible French influence). Eastern European Yiddish r was uvular despite the fact that the r of eastern European languages sharing territory with Yiddish has always been overwhelmingly apical. Jews came from Germany to eastern Europe between 1100 and 1650. Thus, the testimony of Yiddish provides independent confirmation of other recent arguments for early uvular [R] on German-speaking territory. The weight of all the evidence leads to one conclusion: the theory that German uvular [R] came from France is no longer tenable.