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  • A history of German: What the past reveals about today’s language by Joseph Salmons
  • David Fertig
A history of German: What the past reveals about today’s language. By Joseph Salmons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi, 396. ISBN 9780199697946. $35.

This is an exciting time for linguists who specialize in and teach the history of major European languages. The well-established narratives that dominated textbooks and introductory courses for generations have unraveled in a number of interesting ways. Current theoretical debates raise fundamental questions about the nature of language change. Societal and ideological changes have led many language historians to shift their focus away from standard languages and traditional dialects and pay much more attention to the full range and richness of discourse. Technological advances are giving us increasingly massive databases and new tools that allow us to answer questions concerning, for example, subtle shifts in frequency of usage that few even thought to ask a generation ago. Equally significant are new possibilities for collaboration and publication. With A history of German and the companion website at http://www.historyofgerman.net/, Joseph Salmons has given us a new kind of textbook that not only reflects all of these changes but also makes its own significant contribution to progress in the field.

The basic organization of the book is conventional, with a short introduction and conclusion sandwiching six chronologically ordered chapters that take us from Proto-Indo-European to the present. These chapters provide solid coverage of familiar ground: Grimm’s Law, reduction and loss of unstressed syllables, High-German consonant shift, umlaut, simplification of inflection and rise of periphrastic constructions, standardization, regional and social variation, and so on. As we would expect based on the book’s subtitle, there is a pervasive emphasis on connections between remote historical facts and patterns that are still observable today. This is of great pedagogical value and broadly consistent with current ‘evolutionary’ approaches to grammatical structure (354).

In his extensive coverage of recent and ongoing research, S is often critical but also strikingly inclusive and open-minded. The focus is on open questions and work in progress. Indeed, S presents the entire project of writing the history of German as one grand, collaborative work in progress and encourages readers to play an active role. The Updates page on the companion website [End Page 548] contains a growing list of comments from readers, accompanied by remarks from S that make clear how the project will benefit from this feedback. I have recently sent in my own lists, and I offer here three examples of points where S’s accounts have inspired me to think in new ways about phenomena that have long interested me and to formulate some suggestions for revisions or clarifications.

First, S characterizes the ‘Bavarian quantity relations’ (BQR)—which he discusses in connection with both Early New High German (ENHG) lenition (242–44) and word-final neutralization of fortis-lenis contrasts (Auslautverhärtung, 290–93)—as follows: ‘the laryngeal quality of a final obstruent associates with vowel quality … a long or tense nucleus requires a lax or lenis coda obstruent, while a short or lax nucleus correlates with a tense or fortis coda obstruent’ (291). This is accurate, but it does not provide a complete picture of the (morpho)phonological or dialectological significance of the BQR, and it could leave readers with some false assumptions about how the pattern arose historically.

I would start by explaining that the fortis obstruents of Bavarian are almost all reflexes of Old High German (OHG) geminates, affricates, and certain clusters. When such historically long consonants occur medially in modern Bavarian, the stressed syllable is always of the lax vowel + fortis consonant type, whereas intervocalic reflexes of simplex obstruents are lenis and the preceding stressed vowel is tense/long. This is very similar to the pattern that has developed in standard German and, as S explains elsewhere (132–33, 236–38), can be plausibly accounted for in terms of the same preference for bimoraic stressed syllables that gave rise to most of the OHG intervocalic geminates and affricates in the first place.

Turning to monosyllables, the mere fact that Central and...

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