Volume 130, Issue 3

From Old High German to the contemporary language there was only a single process that affected vowels: the increase in the relief of stressed syllables against unstressed ones. Apart from a few assimilations that are well understood, there are fortitions in stressed syllables and lenitions in unstressed syllables; these changes, including the behavior of diphthongs, are phonologizations of the phonetic correlates of stress. Open syllable lengthening is not a straightforward fortition but rather an effect of the syllable cut prosody that serves the purpose of maintaining the quantity opposition against the lengthening effect of strong dynamic stress; the syllable cut prosody also explains New High German monophthongization.

An analysis of dialect words from throughout the Rhineland presented here supports the view that the OHG shift began after short vowels and spread to consonants after long vowels only secondarily. Furthermore, pre-OHG *- p , *- t , *- k shifted less consistently after long vowels in Rhenish Frankish varieties than they did in other dialects of Old High German. To explain this difference we posit (following Schmidt, Die sprachhistorische Genese der mittelfränkischen Tonakzente: 201–233, 2002 and Schmidt/Künzel, Das Rätsel löst sich: 135–163, 2006) that tone accents in the pre-OHG Rhenish Frankish varieties were originally derivative of the intrinsic (phonetic) variation in length found among long vowels. Intrinsically longer [–high] long vowels had a long, falling tone accent that emphasized their length, and that delayed or blocked the shift of postvocalic * p , * t , * k (> f / ff , s / ss , x / xx ) in that environment.

Medieval Latin texaca is a loan from Germanic languages (presumably Old West Franconian) and means ›theft‹, especially the criminal forms which were originally punished by death penalty. The word is a compound, consisting of Germanic * tak - ›take (away)‹ and * sakō meaning ›guilt, sin, crime‹. Analyzing title 10 (= 11 D, E) of the ›Lex Salica‹ and its ›Malbergian glosses‹ it can be shown in what cases texaca is used and how it can be differentiated in order to describe special crimes concerning murder or abduction of slaves. As a by-product the case of theft by a slave in favour of a freeman is discussed. As a result it can be shown that a particularly long and intriguing gloss is sort of a table of contents of the whole title 10.

The paper explores the negotiations of medieval theological discourses on colours in Wolfram's ›Parzival‹. The episode of Parzival's encounter with Ither, the red knight, for example, points to the significance of these discourses for Wolfram's construction of the story. On the one hand, Parzival's desire for and his violent acquisition of Ither's armour seem to draw from chromophobic arguments by Bernhard of Clairvaux, since the colour of the armour represents the hero's murder and his fall from grace. On the other hand, Parzival's appropriation of the red armour simultaneously signifies his rise in courtly society. Thus, the episode reflects the high esteem of colours in the Middle Ages derived from the medieval philosophy of light.