Volume 147, Issue 1

Since the Old High German Period, German has undergone a profound typological change. It has increasingly developed boundary-marking structures that make it more listener- and reader-friendly. This paper has two aims. First, it reviews previous research to show how this change occurs at the syntactic, phonological, inflectional and graphemic levels. Second, it demonstrates that this recipient-oriented shift also affects the level of word formation. As compounding patterns became highly productive during the Early New High German period, the need to distinguish between compounds and phrases grew. Through the process of morphologization, compounds have come to display features that mark them as complex words. As a result, they are easily recognizable as information units, aligning with the broader trend of boundary marking in German.

The manuscripts of the Wellcome scribe are a group of illustrated learned codices, written mainly in Latin, which were presumably produced in Thuringia around the middle of the 15 th  century. Whereas the text-image structures of individual codices have been researched since the 1920s, partly in the context of the Warburg School, their common origin has only been known since the 1990s. The pictorial traditions and textual compilation strategies that can be grasped in the manuscripts continue to pose a challenge for research. The specific composition of eschatological, moralising and, in a broader sense, medical texts, which are occasionally interspersed with vernacular sections, point to an audience in the vicinity of educational institutions such as universities, which at the same time placed a high value on practical life orientation. A polarity of eschatology and care becomes tangible, which seems to be typical of late medieval mentality. The specific nature of this mentality and its intermedial manifestation in the manuscripts of the Wellcome scribe await further research, which is to be promoted in a colloquium announced in this article for spring 2026.