Middle High German - Writing System

Writing System

Middle High German texts are written in the Latin alphabet, in Gothic minuscules that evolved into the Fraktur typefaces of the Early Modern period.

Middle High German had no standardised spelling. Modern editions, however, generally standardise according to a set of conventions established by Karl Lachmann in the 19th century. There are several important features in this standardised orthography which are not characteristics of the original manuscripts:

  • the marking of vowel length is almost entirely absent from MHG manuscripts.
  • the marking of umlauted vowels is often absent or inconsistent in the manuscripts.
  • a curly-tailed z (<ȥ> or <ʒ>) is used in modern handbooks and grammars to indicate the /s/ or /s/-like sound which arose from Germanic /t/ in the High German consonant shift. This character has no counterpart in the original manuscripts which typically use or to indicate this sound
  • the original texts often use and for the semi-vowels /j/ and /w/.

A particular issue is that many manuscripts are of much later date than the works they contain, with signs of later scribes modifying the spellings, with greater or lesser consistency, in accordance with the conventions of their own time. There is also considerable regional variation in the spellings of the original texts, which modern editions largely conceal.

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