The Oxford Guide to Middle High German by Howard Jones and Martin H. Jones (review)

It is hard to believe that this monumental work has been written by a team of two scholars. A project of such scope might have occupied a whole department for years. The first 225 pages deal with a few general concepts, phonetics, grammar (morphology and syntax), and lexis. The exposition is of necessity condensed (twelve pages on nouns, thirty-six pages on verbs, and so forth). Everything is mentioned, but from the nature of the case, nothing could be explored in depth.

The rubrics following “Lexis” are “Versification,” “Historical, Cultural, and Literary Background,” and “Selection of Annotated Texts.” The chapter on the background takes over sixty pages, and text analysis runs from pp. 317–592. The volume ends with a glossary of linguistic terms (including such seemingly familiar ones as agreement, clause, declension, sentence, etc.), the glossary, an appendix on phonetic symbols, a second appendix titled “From Manuscripts to Modern Editions,” and a bibliography.

The scholarly level of the Guide deserves the highest praise. My objections concern only the usefulness of some sections. Professional historical linguists will find them too sparse, while the uninitiated will feel overwhelmed. Here is a case in point. On p. 26, we are told that Middle High German (MHG) had three short e-phonemes: /e/ (as in geste “guests”), /ɛ/ (as in bette “bed”), and /ä/ as in mähtic “mighty”). This is a dubious statement, because its validity depends on the interpretation of primary and secondary umlaut; it would have been safer to pass by this point (no one is going to pronounce three e’s in MHG) or to develop it in full (the second alternative is of course out of the question in such a book). Main stress, we are told (p. 35), is a combination of longer duration and greater loudness. In an encyclopedic guide, such dubious statements fall on barren ground. And so does the entire section on the syllable structure, in which one will hardly notice a single important statement, namely that in MHG open syllables can be short (să-gen, not sā-gen), though we do not know whether a pause after sa- was allowed (stressed monosyllables of the să type did not exist). My list of similar quibbles is rather long, but it is hardly worth reproducing here.

By contrast, the “future-oriented” sections are necessary and useful. They explain what happened to MHG sounds in the course of history (the open-syllable lengthening, mentioned above; diphthongization, and so forth), but it is less clear why a compendium devoted to MHG needed many pages on the origins of MHG phonemes and thereby tried to emulate manuals of the entire history of German (with inroads on prehistory), rather than starting somewhere after Notker. As is known, the language we call Middle High German is mainly represented by the koiné, and that is why students of this language have a serious advantage over those who approach Middle English, with its multitude of dialectal texts. To appreciate those, one needs a good deal of information about Old English.

In the chapter on syntax, the sections on the subjunctive and the cases are especially welcome. One could only wish that the authors remembered how checkered their audience is and highlighted (perhaps printed in bold) a few statements, for example, “in MHG, the use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is almost the rule” or “in MHG, the genitive is widely used after verbs.” Judging by the section on word order, the authors (quite realistically) do not overrate our students’ proficiency in the niceties of either English or Modern German syntax (let us remember that the index of linguistic terms features clause, sentence, agreement, and the like). Characteristically, nothing is said in the preface about the book’s prospective readership. It must have been conceived as a guide and a companion to everyone, but everyone is a loose concept.

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