Materialien zur historischen entwicklung der gross- und kleinschreibungsregeln Ed. by Wolfgang Mentrup (review)

230 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Steinmeyer considered his teaching in Erlangen rather a burden. He obviously was not greatly interested in historical phonology: 'Allerdings habe ich verflucht wenig Interesse daran, wie ein Dichter seine e ausgesprochen hat' (125). Priebsch, who was born in the German-speaking part of Bohemia, did not personally and professionally escape the intense anti-German sentiment in England during the outbreak of the First World War (and apparently as early as 1907: p. 165). Editing and commenting have been very carefully done. 'Unterbringung' (167) should be 'Unterbrechung'; 'P' for 'thorn' may just be an unfortunate choice of type (kunPa, 175). The novel commented on by Schönbach (184) is Rudolf Hans Bartsch's once-famous Zwölf aus der Steiermark (1906), which also reflected on the sexual prowess of university professors in Graz. We can be grateful to Closs for editing part of this unique collection of letters between two prominent scholars. The Schmidt Verlag can be congratulated on the excellent appearance ofthe volume. [Herbert Penzl, Berkeley.] Ansätze zu einer pragmatischen Sprachgeschichte: Zürcher Kolloquium 1978. Ed. by Horst Sitta. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, 21.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980. Pp. vüi, 136. These seven revised papers on the pragmatic historiography of language were read in June 1978, at a conference in Zürich, by Dieter Cherubim , Horst Sitta, Peter von Polenz, Harald Burger, Stefan Sonderegger, Helmut Henne, and Roland Ris. Each paper is followed by a brief helpful bibliography. Cherubim's contribution (3-21) discusses, as part of a program of 'historische Sprachpragmatik ', the application of modern techniques of textual analysis to 'historical' texts. Sitta's topic is 'Pragmatisches Sprachverstehen und pragmatikorientierte Sprachgeschichte' (23-33). Von Polenz (35-51) analyses the style of German linguistic historiography: he advocates focusing the description on the acts of speakers, rather than on metaphorical, hypostatizing, abstract formulations. Burger (53-69) discusses interjections as a part of speech, and their role in speech-acts and in the dialog of 17th century plays. Sonderegger (71-88), now probably the most distinguished scholar in the field of Old High German philology, treats the reflexes of the spoken language of classroom instruction in the translations of St. Gallen's Notker III Teutonicus (about 950-1022). Henne (89-102) demonstrates how the analysis ofdialog in 18th century plays can be effectively used to reconstruct features of the spoken language of the time. Ris (103-28) takes up various problems in the pragmatic history of German in Switzerland, which around 1900 was close to adopting non-dialectal High German as the spoken standard ('Einheitsprache '); this trend was reversed, and now the dialects are making inroads on the domain of the written language. Under the influence of Romance languages, Swiss orthography no longer recognizes standard German ß, but substitutes ss. At the end of this highly informative volume, the contributors summarize what they consider to be the tasks of a 'pragmatisch orientierte Sprachgeschichte'. [Herbert Penzl, Berkeley.] Materialien zur historischen entwicklung der gross- und kleinschreibungsregeln . Ed. by Wolfgang Mentrup. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, 23.) Tübingen: Niemeyer , 1980. Pp. vii, 336. This volume appeared in the same series as Burckhard Garbe's Die deutsche rechtschreibung und ihre reform, 1722-1974 (1978), and is edited by another crusader for the 'Kleinschreibung ' or decapitalization of German nouns: Dr. Mentrup of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Outsiders may be surprised at this currently great German interest in the reform of what, in the U.S., C. V. Pollard considered a great help in the teaching of scientific German; others may criticize the reform as trivial tampering with established practice. This comes at a time when fewer individuals than ever advocate any change in the vagaries of English orthography—which, to be sure, in one aspect received a generative-transformational blessing as optimal. As a fringe benefit for us, however, this strange interest has led here to the welcome facsimile publication of four interesting 19th century essays on the history of German noun capitalization: by Friedrich Schubert (1817), BOOK NOTICES 231 August Hagemann (1875, 1876), and P. Tesch (1890). They are apparently intended to show that controversy regarding the use of capitals is not a recent development. De...