Proto-Semitic Genitive Ending.

Benjamin Suchard of Leiden University has a new paper “The Reconstruction of the Proto-Semitic Genitive Ending and a Suggestion on its Origin” (Studia Orientalia Electronica Vol. 9 No. 1); the abstract:

The Proto-Semitic genitive ending on triptotic nouns is commonly reconstructed as *-im (unbound state)/*-i (bound state). In Akkadian, however, this case ending is long -ī- before pronominal suffixes. Since the length of this vowel is unexplained, I argue that it is original and that the Akkadian bound state ending -i should also be reconstructed as long *, explaining its retention in word-final position. This form seems more original than Proto-West-Semitic *-i. Hence, the Proto-Semitic bound state genitive ending should also be reconstructed as *. Through internal reconstruction supported by the parallel of kinship terms like *ʔab-um ‘father’, I arrive at a pre-Proto-Semitic reconstruction of the genitive ending as *-ī-m (unbound), * (bound). This paper then explores a hypothetical scenario where the genitive ending * is derived from the adjectivizing ‘nisbe’ suffix through reanalysis of adjectival constructions like *bayt-u śarr-ī ‘the/a royal house’ as construct chains with meanings like ‘the/a king’s house’; with the addition of mimation and the resultant vowel shortening, this yielded the Proto-Semitic construction with a genitive, *bayt-u śarr-im. The genitive case failed to develop with diptotic nouns because they did not take mimation and in the dual and plural because the nisbe adjective was derived from the uninflected (singular) noun stem; hence, these categories all retain the more original contrast between the nominative and and an undifferentiated oblique case.

I’m curious what people who know more about Semitic than I do think of this.

Comments

  1. Do we know whether the Semitic case endings have cognate equivalents in other Afro-Asiatic languages? That would allow an outside check on this theory.

  2. Good point.

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    This form seems more original than Proto-West-Semitic *-i.

    What’s to stop me saying that it “seems” less original to me?

    It seems unwise to assume that Akkadian was particularly conservative phonologically compared with other older Semitic languages. And wouldn’t you expect at least some traces of a long /i:/ in West Semitic, if this was a Proto-West innovation? (Cases like “father”, “brother” don’t work for this, because there all three case vowels are long in the construct.)

    Huehnergard’s grammar says that some Assyriologists think that the gen sg -i- was in fact short before pronominal suffixes.

    Others will know much more …

    Do we know whether the Semitic case endings have cognate equivalents in other Afro-Asiatic languages?

    I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence out there. Egyptian disobligingly lost its case vowels very early indeed, though IIRC there is some reason to suppose that there was once a nominative in -u.
    I have seen it suggested that the Somali feminine sg subject marker* -i is in some way connected with the Semitic case endings, but it’s always seemed pretty thin stuff to me.

    *In Somali, like a lot of languages in that part of the world, the accusative is unmarked and the nominative marked. There’s nothing about the Somali genitive to suggest an old -i ending, though that would of course suit Suchard’s theory fine.

  4. What’s to stop me saying that it “seems” less original to me?

    Yeah, that “seems” seemed hand-wavy to me.

  5. PlasticPaddy says

    Is this just genitive or was there also a dual form with the same or similar ending in these Semitic languages? There would seem to be an Egyptian dual ending y (but no genitive as such).

  6. David Eddyshaw says

    Beja has three cases, and their expression actually is reminiscent of the Semitic case endings.

    Forms with possessive suffixes vary by case; “your (sg) camel(s)” is

    nom sg kamuuk pl kamaak
    acc sg kamook pl kameek

    The same uu oo etc are prefixed as definite articles: “the camel(s)” is

    nom sg uukaam pl aakam
    acc sg ookaam pl eekam

    Genitive nouns precede the possessed, however.

    The genitive suffix begins with an infixed t if the possessor is feminine. The form of the suffix then varies according to the gender and number of the possessum, as -i before m sg/pl. -iit before f sg, -eet before f pl. So with uutak (nom) “the man”:

    utaki yaas “the man’s dog”
    utakiit yaas “the man’s bitch”

    I don’t know if the possessor also inflects for accusative case when the whole NP is an object. The source I got this from (Wedekind and Wedekind, “A Learner’s Grammar of Beja”) is (IMHO) very badly organised.

    There’s enough there to suggest that genitive /i/ is older than Semitic, at any rate, and no evidence in Beja itself that it differed in length from other case markers. But I must admit that the precise relationship to the Semitic system is a teeny bit unclear to me …

  7. Reminds me of Lameen’s latest post (Lemurian Arabic), where I see you commented.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    @PP:

    The dual in Proto-Semitic ended in *-a:na in the nominative, *-ayna in the oblique, with the na being dropped before a following genitive.

    Nicked from John Huehnergard

    https://www.academia.edu/38646177/2019_Proto_Semitic

  9. David Marjanović says

    The genitive case failed to develop with diptotic nouns because they did not take mimation and in the dual and plural because the nisbe adjective was derived from the uninflected (singular) noun stem; hence, these categories all retain the more original contrast between the nominative and and an undifferentiated oblique case.

    If the genitive is really restricted like that, that definitely cries out for some kind of explanation.

  10. Re, the “seeming” originality of *-ī : The hand-waving is only present in the abstract. The paper prefers *-ī over *-i in Proto-Semitic because
    1. Given the proto-Akkadian system of bound-form case endings (nom. -u, acc. -a, gen -ī), there is nothing to motivate the lengthening of the vowel in only one case.
    2. Typologically, /i/ is reduced more often and lengthened less frequently than /a/.
    3. Derivation from a reinterpreted nisbe *-ī would explain why the genitive form was ancestrally long.

    You have to accept some things about the reconstruction of proto–East Semitic (or maybe just proto-Akkadian) for this to be convincing, but it at least sounds promising. It also fits with reconstructions of PS as a marked-nominative language with a -u/-a nominal/oblique case system. But, as the article says, this isn’t completely uncontroversial either.

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    It occurs to me that nisbe adjectives are also older than Semitic (Egyptian had them) so I suppose the fact (if it is a fact) that the genitive –i is older than Semitic would not actually refute the idea that the latter was in some way derived from the former; it would just push the time of the whole process back to Before Semitic. Which, on reflection, it would pretty much have to be anyway, given that the genitive case has to be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, after all.

    Huehnergard himself somewhere says that he thinks the connection is indubitable, but unfortunately without further explanation. (And many indubitable things have turned out to be untrue in the end.)

    The best argument in favour seems to me to be the fact that the Semitic genitive always coincides with the accusative in the dual and plural, and in the sg too in some nouns (Ugaritic had diptotes, as well as Arabic, so they’re not just some sort of Arabic weirdness.) That does seem suggestive. [Ninja’d by DM.]

    The Beja system seems to cry out for reanalysis. I’m not at all persuaded that W & W are right in just simply stating that B has three cases. It’s odd sort of genitive case ending that agrees with the possessum, and that does rather make it look like an agglutinated possessive adjective in origin. It could perfectly well be a nisbe … Egyptian has something very like that IIRC (nisbe‘s based on pronouns, I mean.)

    I was looking through W &W to see if I could actually find any examples of a possessor-possessum NP as a verb object, to see if the possessor is in fact marked at the beginning as accusative. No luck. It’s a frustrating book.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    As ə is in the offing, could I ask:

    Akkadian proper names like Ištar lack case endings, a phenomenon which I recall seeing attributed somewhere – highly implausibly – to them being so archaic that they antedate the rise of the case system. Could these forms simply be diptotes, with the final vowels lost because there was no mimation? Or doesn’t that work?

  13. @DE
    I think you might be mixing up a couple different phenomena.

    Names of gods like Ištar did take case, but the normally logographic spelling of god names meant that case wasn’t always written.

    According Huehnergard’s Akkadian grammar (which is based mostly on Old Babylonian norms. Not sure if Old Akkadian was different in this way), personal names in general were indeclinable. The name Aḫum would always appear in the nominative case, while the word aḫum, ‘brother,’ would be declined as per usual. Lots of Akkadian names are noun phrases that don’t necessarily end in a “free” case ending. Sîn-šar-ilī, ‘Sin [is] king of the gods,’ for example, ends in a genitive plural determined by the ‘of the gods’ part of the NP. It may be that attaching case-endings to personal names in Akkadian was so complex that speakers collectively threw up their hands and gave up.

    Personal names do sometimes preserve what may be archaic case forms and/or case uses in names that are entire noun- or verb-phrases in their own right. I don’t remember the details (other than that this is where the main evidence for a marked-nominative two-case system in PS comes from), but there’s a whole book on the subject for the terminally interested.

    This starts to break down in the first millennium BC, when (presumably) the lack of case in the spoken language catches up with the written norms, and nouns start appearing with no case endings at all.

  14. David Eddyshaw says

    Thanks!

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    Eventually remembered where I (partly) got the notion from: Ungnad-Matouš, p50: “Die Götternamen stehen bisweilen im Status absolutus (urspr. wohl nur Vokativ.)” (Same para where he says that proper names often stay in the nominative form throughout, as you were saying.) He contrasts bēlum “lord” with the name of the god Bēl.

    So it was only divine names. I can’t remember where I read the (silly) idea that it was an archaism from predeclensional days.

  16. David Eddyshaw says

    The Hasselbach book looks quite interesting. The idea that the Semitic case system goes back to a marked-nominative one seems quite possible. Classical Arabic has appositional accusatives, and some funky constructions where a conjunction is followed by a subject in the accusative case, just to confuse you.

  17. @DE

    Looking at the Case in Semitic book, it seems that you’re righter than I gave you credit for. There are a few things going on (and I’d need to read closer to untangle the exact chronological order), but the thrust of the argument is that Proto-Akkadian nouns lacked mimation in certain environments. When Akkadian lost short final vowels, mimation protected the cases, except for in these particular environments. This would be the origin of the Akkadian absolute state and the caseless vocative.

    Places where mimation didn’t occur often lined up with the archaic *-a oblique case, which is why there is often an alternation of Ø- and a-forms in the same syntactic position in personal names, where fossilized archaic forms coexisted with newer coinages.

    So the Ø-forms don’t antedate case, but they are a reflex of a case system that antedates the one that’s productive in the actually attested language.

  18. It may be that attaching case-endings to personal names in Akkadian was so complex that speakers collectively threw up their hands and gave up.

    This is what happens when you live the easy life in the lowlands. People in the Caucasus never give up their complexities!

  19. David Eddyshaw says

    I wonder if the peculiar Ethiopic construct in -a for all cases could be shoehorned into this somehow …

  20. David Marjanović says

    Indeclinable personal names remind me of German, where first names were declined until at least Goethe (“Ich sehe Götzen! Ich sehe Georgen!”), and then every trace of this disappeared even in the most highfalutin registers (except in the genitive, to the extent that the genitive hasn’t disappeared wholesale). I wonder if that’s connected to the use of (declined!) articles with personal names in like half the dialects – which has, ironically, created a vocative case that is marked by lack of the article…

    People in the Caucasus never give up their complexities!

    But they do shuffle them around. West Caucasian has very long polysynthetic verb forms, but very simple noun morphology. East Caucasian has complex case systems, but very simple verb morphology – Chechen hardly has any left! On top of that, instrumentals become ergatives and whatnot.

  21. Well, that’s to keep outsiders from learning the languages. Just when you think you’ve got the cases down…

  22. indeclinable personal names remind me of German, where first names were declined until at least Goethe (“Ich sehe Götzen! Ich sehe Georgen!”), and then every trace of this disappeared even in the most highfalutin registers
    At least in a literary register one can find it still in the second half of the 19th century; I remember being puzzled by declined forms like Amalaswintha / Amalaswinthen in Ein Kampf um Rom (published 1876) when I read it as a boy.

  23. @David Marjanović: The continued declension of proper names in the genitive seems to be qualitatively different from other cases. It’s all over Germanic, at least in possessives, if not necessarily in prepositional genitives. It even survives in that form in English, a language that has aggressively done away with almost all of its case structure!

    In fact, English seems to demonstrate that there is something really, really easy about a grammatical –s suffix. English manages to use that same sibilant suffix in several places: in regular plurals, in the only verb form that the language still declines (third person singular), and in possessives. Of course, only the last of those is inherited; the others are innovations. But –s is so common, it puts the next most important regular grammatical affix, –ed, to shame.

  24. David Marjanović says

    Old Chinese had a lot of *s- prefixes and *-s suffixes…

    We have Ein Kampf um Rom; I’m not sure if I ever read more than the last page (where the last Goths walk out of the scene). But then, the edition is certainly not from 1876, so the spelling must be updated, and maybe the grammar was as well. I should check at some point.

  25. German, where first names were declined until at least Goethe

    yiddish only declines names, some family relationships, ייִד [yid / “jew”], and האַרצ [harts / “heart”]. and even them not very much: dative singular [-n]; accusative singular for men and ייִד [-n]; human possessors [-s] (in lieu of a genitive). i assume that’s the residue of more elaborate declension system, but i don’t know what it’s supposed to have looked like.

  26. “instrumentals become ergatives and whatnot.”

    What is an instrumental but an ergative deferred?

  27. “What happens to an ergative deferred?”

  28. David Eddyshaw says

    The heart is made sick by it.

  29. David Eddyshaw says

    i assume that’s the residue of more elaborate declension system, but i don’t know what it’s supposed to have looked like

    Jerold Frakes’ nice Guide to Old Literary Yiddish (where “old” is basically “prior to about 1500”) has for noun declension

    Weak declension, all genders:
    final -n in all cases or numbers except nominative singular and neuter accusative singular

    Strong declension:
    genitive singular: -s in masculines and neuters (no ending for feminines)
    dative singular: masculines/neuters frequently end in -e
    dative plural: all genders frequently end in -n

    He explains that “frequently” here already means “more often not”; and that the genitive was already uncommon.

  30. Reminded me Belati mentioned in the neighbouring thread. In Akkadian context Bēlti, Bēltija (Bēltiya), “My Lady”.

  31. But then, the edition is certainly not from 1876, so the spelling must be updated, and maybe the grammar was as well. I should check at some point
    The edition I read as a boy was my parents’ and must have been from the 1950s; spelling was regular Duden spelling, but the grammar wasn’t updated. In my experience, that’s rarely done for anything written later than the 16th century.

  32. Since the book is long out of copyright, I note that archive.org has multiple copies of Ein Kampf um Rom. However, it looks like all of the original scans are from editions that were typeset in Blackletter. Hans/DM: Do you recall what the typeface was in the editions you read?

    There is a Project Gutenberg edition in some standard serif typeface that says it was originally from a 1906 edition, but I don’t know if the process of digitizing might have included spelling and grammar modernization.

    There are scans of an edition with an English introduction (standard serif typeface) by Carla Wenckebach, but the German text is still Blackletter.

    I see there’s also a Finnish translation: Taistelu Roomasta.

    𝕻𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖊𝖞, 𝖘𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝕴

  33. 𝕻𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖊𝖞, 𝖘𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝕴

    Unicode support for Sütterlin, please….

    I see they have symbols like 𝒢.
    In scientific Russian, when you read a formula out loud, you call it “[letter name] beautiful”, to let your students know what letter it was.

  34. @Owlmirror: The typeface was normal Latin letters. Generally, the switch from black-letter to Latin happened in the 1930s/40s, books in black-letter after WW II are rare and mostly limited to bibliophile reprints.

  35. books in black-letter after WW II are rare and mostly limited to bibliophile reprints.

    The only book printed in Fraktur I saw as a kid was a copy of the New Testament my parents were presented with when they got married in the mid-1950s. It was cheaply printed and badly bound (tending to fall apart), hardly a “bibliophile reprint”. At least Fraktur was still readable, if you made an effort (although the similarity of long s and f was irritating). Sütterlin handwriting is simply indecipherable.

  36. the grammar wasn’t updated. In my experience, that’s rarely done for anything written later than the 16th century.

    That’s what editors claim, although some editors admit that, for example, the use of dative vs. accusative has been adapted to modern norms because usage at the time (classicism/romanticism) was chaotic, anyway. And once I came upon an edition of Hölderlin which claimed only to modernize spelling but which replaced Hölderlin’s zween (as printed in the critical editions) by more modern zwei.

  37. @DE: thanks! and of course frakes was the answer… i have it in digital form, but forget that i do because i haven’t looked into it since working on a Bovo-bukh project a few years ago (and because it’s not an actual codex on a shelf).

  38. The only book printed in Fraktur I saw as a kid was a copy of the New Testament my parents were presented with when they got married in the mid-1950s. It was cheaply printed and badly bound (tending to fall apart), hardly a “bibliophile reprint”.
    Well, I said “mostly”. It’s also possible that that bible was from stocks printed before the 50s. I assume it’s too much of a hassle to check the publishing year, assuming you even have access to that bible anymore? (And anyway, I have a reprint of a quadrilingual New Testament edition originally from the 19th century where the German part is in Fraktur, but it’s a cheap paperback – I would subsume that under “bibliophile edition”, because it reproduces an old print and is not a new edition of an old work.)
    And once I came upon an edition of Hölderlin which claimed only to modernize spelling but which replaced Hölderlin’s zween (as printed in the critical editions) by more modern zwei
    That’s shocking. The only place where I would expect something like that is new editions of classics for children or young adults (like Schwab’s “Sagen des klassischen Altertums”), not in novels for adults or poetry.

  39. David Marjanović says

    Goethe still wrote things that are plain ungrammatical today, and that are usually modernized.

    Amerika, du hast es besser
    Als unser Continent, das alte
    Hast keine verfallene Schlösser
    Und keine Basalte.

    Kontinent is exclusively masculine nowadays, and verfallene absolutely needs an extra -n here.

    However, I found Ein Kampf um Rom. “New edition 1972.” Unremarkable serif typeface. Very poetic language, including the syntax. The vocabulary requires enormous background knowledge; e.g., the Norse thing is ascribed to the Goths and simply rendered Ding, no footnotes, nothing. Spelling updated, Mataswinthen (acc.) in dialogue, though Mataswintha (acc.), not to mention Rauthgundis (dat., acc.), in the narration.

    Stowasser’s Latin dictionary for schools kept all the German in Fraktur into the 1970s. But that was very much the exception.

  40. PlasticPaddy says

    The -is and -en datives for nativised Latin names (but Rauthgundis?) is a thing for mediaeval German, compare Lübecks Johannis and Marien Quartiere.

  41. @DM: I see that the editions of older literature I read must have been more faithful to the original grammar than some others out there…

  42. January First-of-May says

    declension of proper names

    Meanwhile, in Russian, the literary form* (e.g.) Меня зовут Лизой (approximate glossing: 1SG.ACC call.3PL Lisa.INS, literally something like “They call me Lisa”) is almost entirely replaced by the undeclined version Меня зовут Лиза (respectively, 1SG.ACC call.3PL Lisa.NOM).

    However, in approximately all other contexts (i.e. when not stating what someone is called), names in Russian essentially decline as if they were nouns.

    In scientific Russian, when you read a formula out loud, you call it “[letter name] beautiful”, to let your students know what letter it was.

    I once met a lecturer (I have sadly since completely forgotten who he was) who did the “beautiful” letters for formulas by just adding a zigzag-y squiggle to the normal letter. He said it was very convenient if he ever ended up in a position where he had to make a “beautiful” form of, say, alpha.

     
    *) I took this specific example, without the glossing, from an actual linguistics-adjacent text, where it was presented as if it was the normal phrase for “my name is Lisa”; perhaps it was a century ago, but these days approximately nobody says that, and I suspect it would probably be understood as something like “I’m compared to Lisa”

  43. David Eddyshaw says

    My grandfather had a copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra in Fraktur, which he bought when he was a student in Germany in the 1920’s. The Fraktur always seemed somehow appropriate … (Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!)

    His German translation of Pickwick Papers was in Fraktur too (I remember as a child being struck particularly by the “S” in “Sam.”) The story is that he bought this on his tutor’s advice after he arrived in Germany knowing too little German to cope with his lectures: said tutor asked what his favourite book was in English, and suggested he get a translation and read it. It worked, anyway …

  44. His German translation of Pickwick Papers was in Fraktur too
    I have one, too, from the 19th century. I still remember buying it from an antiquarian book stall in Basel in the autumn of 1990…

  45. I do not know German. I also do not know Engish, French, Arabic, Russian, and anything, but I do not know German more profoundly. I read in it sometimes. When you are fighting an uphill battle, it is encouraging to see your adversary retreating.

    You remember scripts after some 20 minutes of using, I first noticed it in early computer era when Cyrillic users received letters in wrong encoding, that is in a substitution cipher. I see it with Tifinagh, I see it with Syriac. Of course, it works with Fraktur too, so reading becomes easier soon, while making an actual progress with German would have taken much more time.

    Then you forget it, so next time it works again. But I admit that Fraktur is particularly resistant to human attempts to remember it (compared to Tifinagh, Syriac scripts and anything):-( One specific problem is that in scripts similar to what Wikipedia calls Walbaum-Fraktur some capitals (line 1, word 3 and line 2 ,word 3 in this picture) are almost identical.
    In a foreign toponym, when your scan or paper is of poor quality you only know what it is when you enlarge it and compare to other occurences of the same letter in the same book in a German word.

  46. Somewhere (in a letter ?) Kant remarks that reading only Antiqua tires him, so he reads Fraktur for relief. [I’m not sure he called it “Fraktur”.] He writes along similar lines in the addendum to part 3 of the Streit der Fakultäten.

    He and some contemporary Augenärzte at the end of the 18C considered Antiqua to be bad for the eyes.

  47. David Eddyshaw says

    This is a more coherent account of Beja:

    https://www.academia.edu/11426675/2014_Beja_grammatical_sketch

    It describes a somewhat different system; whether this is to do with dialect, I cannot tell. At any rate, it seems rather more consistent with the notion of the genitive as a real case; in particular, the article preceding a noun in the genitive has a distinct form, masculine i-, feminine ti-. (Though this seems actually to be a default form of the article, found with nouns that for one reason or another don’t take the case-marked articles, which are limited to monosyllabic nouns, and disyllabic nouns with -i- in the first open syllable.)

    There seems to be some suggestion that the accusative is actually the unmarked case, which is interesting. Also, the case system is apparently breaking down.

  48. Within East Chadic, Migama (Jungraithmayr & Adams) has a somewhat similar system, with a genitive/locative case formed by suffixing -Ci to masculine nouns, -ti to feminine nouns; thus for instance gìr-tì gàmâw-wì “the house (gér) of the monkey (gàmáw)”, gìr-tì bíisì-tí “the house of the cat (bíisì)”. (The possessor also separately gets marked with a suffix -ti/-tee/-co, depending on number and gender).

  49. David Eddyshaw says

    All this case-ending-preceding-the-noun stuff in Beja is presumably just a straightforward matter of the inflecting article preceding a now-invariant noun (much like German), but it’s still eerily reminiscent of the Big Divide within Volta-Congo between the noun-class-prefixers and the noun-class-suffixers. Which, of course, could be another manifestation of just the same thing.

    The takeover of distinctions previously marked by flexional suffixes by a proclitic article is familiar in French and German (and Egyptian.) A number of Oti-Volta languages, too, have developed agreeing noun class prefixes from proclitic “articles”, and in Konkomba and Ditammari the class suffixes are often so eroded that these new prefixes alone sometimes show the class and/or number marking.

    I can’t come up with many examples of suffixed articles taking over the functions of flexional prefixes, but then flexional prefixes are not nearly so common cross-linguistically, so you’d expect examples to be harder to find.*

    The “Grassfields Bantu” language Aghem has something a bit like that, though, with nouns usually taking class prefixes comme il faut, but regularly substituting a form with a suffix when the noun is “unfocused”; said suffixes derive from an old demonstrative following the noun but taking its own class prefixes. (Aghem has a thrifty principle that class prefixes are only needed once per NP, and they are even dropped when a concordant subject marker comes between the subject NP and the following verb.)

    If suffixing of class affixes was the original order in Volta-Congo, Aghem is now working its way through the transposition process for the second time. But I think it’s much more likely that the reduction of these morphemes from clitics to affixes postdates the protolanguage by a good long way, and that the “prefix vs suffix” divide was really originally a question of word order, not morphology.

    * Though, now I think of it, something analogous to this has happened in the Somali verbal system, where most verbs inflect by suffixing alone, but the suffix comes from an old (prefixing) auxiliary verb.

  50. Somewhere (in a letter ?) Kant remarks that reading only Antiqua tires him, so he reads Fraktur for relief.

    Interesting. The Ausgabe letzter Hand of Wieland’s Complete Works was set in Antiqua, not Fraktur. In the late 20th century (the 1980s, I think) it was reissued as (relatively cheap, but quite beautiful) facsimile edition. The Cologne Stadtbücherei used to have a copy (although some volumes were already missing). I wonder if the decision to print in Antiqua was made by Wieland himself.

  51. The WiPe says

    # Göschen, Leipzig, 1794–1802/05/11 in 39 Bde. und 6 Supplement-Bänden. Die erste Auflage ist in Antiqua gesetzt, die zweite (als solche nicht gekennzeichnet) in Fraktur. #

    I’ll check on that facsimile Ausgabe today. I have a subscription to the Stadtbibliothek.

    # 49 Bde., Göschen, Leipzig 1818–1823, zuzgl. 4 Bde. Wielands Leben. Neu bearbeitet von J. G. Gruber. Mit Einschluß vieler noch ungedruckter Briefe Wielands (Bde. 50–53), Göschen, Leipzig 1828 #

    Holy moly, 53 vols. Printers sure had a lot of work to do back then. Who could pay today for the complete works of Stephen King in Oktav, Kleinoktav, Großoktav and Quart set in Antiqua and Fraktur ?

  52. Good Grief.

    In checking WikiP to remind myself what Antiqua looks like, I see that there was an Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. Because of course there was.

    In most European countries, blackletter typefaces like the German Fraktur were displaced with the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 15th and 16th centuries. However, in Germany, both fonts coexisted until the first half of the 20th century.

    During that time, both typefaces gained ideological connotations in Germany, which led to long and heated disputes on what was the “correct” typeface to use. The eventual outcome was that the Antiqua-type fonts won when the Nazi Party chose to phase out the more ornate-looking Fraktur.

    […]

    In the context of these debates, the two typefaces became increasingly polarized: Antiqua typefaces were seen to be “un-German”, and they were seen to represent this by virtue of their connotations as “shallow”, “light”, and “not serious”. In contrast, Fraktur, with its much darker and denser script, was viewed as representing the allegedly German virtues such as depth and sobriety.

    During the Romantic Era, in which the Middle Ages were glorified, the Fraktur typefaces additionally gained the (historically incorrect) interpretation that they represented German Gothicism. For instance, Goethe’s mother advised her son, who had taken to the clear Antiqua typefaces, to remain—”for God’s sake”—German, even in his letters.

    Otto von Bismarck was a keen supporter of German typefaces. He refused gifts of German books in Antiqua typefaces and returned them to sender with the statement Deutsche Bücher in lateinischen Buchstaben lese ich nicht! (I don’t read German books in Latin letters!)

    […]

    In the United States, Mexico, and Central America, Old Order Amish, Old Order Mennonite, and Old Colony Mennonite schools still teach the Kurrent handwriting and Fraktur script. German books printed by Amish and Mennonite printers use the Fraktur script.

    WikiP for Fraktur says:

    On January 3, 1941, the Nazi Party ended this controversy by switching to international scripts such as Antiqua. Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.[11] German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the regime viewed Fraktur as inhibiting communication in the occupied territories during World War II.[12]

    Well.

  53. The Frankfurter Allgemeine used to print the editorials in Fraktur within living memory. Not sure when that stopped, the early 90s?

  54. My grandmother claimed that she couldn’t tell if a book was set in Roman or Fraktur type. She read both equally well.

  55. @Vanya:

    I don’t remember entire FAZ editorials in Fraktur, but it sure was present somewhere – until 2007, according to the WiPe. Only the banner and the titles of the editorials were still hanging in there. The banner of the print and web edition is still in Fraktur:

    # Seit dem 5. Oktober 2007 erscheint die Zeitung in einer optisch überarbeiteten, moderneren Aufmachung: Dabei entfielen unter anderem die Fraktur-Überschriften über den Kommentaren sowie die Linien zwischen den einzelnen Spalten. #

    That was also the first time a color photo was allowed on the first page !

  56. # 2006 erregte ein Interview größeres Aufsehen, das Günter Grass der FAZ bereitwillig gegeben hatte und in dem er kurz vor der Veröffentlichung seiner Memoiren Beim Häuten der Zwiebel erstmals öffentlich von seiner Waffen-SS-Mitgliedschaft berichtete. 95 Prozent der interviewten Mitarbeiter hätten inhaltlich übereinstimmend gesagt: „Ja, die Zeitung ist konservativ, aber ich bin es nicht.“[32] #

    “I know a lot about art, but I don’t know what I like”

  57. During the Romantic Era, in which the Middle Ages were glorified, the Fraktur typefaces additionally gained the (historically incorrect) interpretation that they represented German Gothicism.

    Elsewhere Wikipedia says that it was Renaissance when blackletter was labeled “Gothic”. (The line: “Not only were blackletter forms called Gothic script, but any other seemingly barbarian script, such as Visigothic, Beneventan, and Merovingian, were also labeled Gothic. ” gives an idea of what I think about the quiality of their claims.)

  58. Fraktur (and similar typefaces) is called gotisk skrift in Norwegian to this day.

    In Astérix et les goths the Goths speak Fraktur in all translations I’ve seen.

  59. Same here. But there are also

    – Romanesque/Gothic art,
    – Gothic novels and
    – Frankish and Hunnish vine (of these I tried Blaufränkisch).

    And as I quoted the line about Visigothic script labeled Gothic (when it is presumably is not Gothic, but just Visigothic?): there is of course rich history of “Gothic” identity in Spain.

    In Wikipedia there was a cute story about Swedish and Spanish bishops arguing over their right to place their chairs closer to the pope, with arguments “we have real Goths here” “yes, but yours are lazy Goths, while all the cool Goths went to Spain”. Sorry, i read it a million years ago in Wikipedia and that time it was not easy to trace such stories to their old sources.

  60. It’s rather disappointing that there wasn’t a big post-1945 Fraktur revival in West Germany as a symbolic rejection of the Nazi attempt to suppress it. Of course, I think many/most folks who don’t happen to know the details will guess wrong about which side the Nazis took on Franktur v. Antiqua, because of insufficiently nuanced stereotypes.

  61. Never having paid much attention, I’d thought of Fraktur as a florid but otherwise normal font. Looking at the k in Frankfurter Allgemeine I find that wasn’t quite true. The image of the whole script on wiki suggests that’s the only truly variant letter, but another image there shows a series of letters from 4 blackletter scripts, and in that version, the capital A in Fraktur is also pretty distinct, to the point that if the wiki-image is accurate, I believe the FAZ banner is actually in a different blackletter font – Rotunda.

    If so, was that a change? Did the FAZ use Fraktur at some point, and then decide to keep a blackletter font, but switch from Fraktur as being too divergent for some readers?

  62. @J.W.: insufficiently nuanced stereotypes

    Perhaps because the lettertypes are so different that “nuance” hardly matters.

    But the phrase is nicely paradoxical.

  63. as a symbolic rejection of the Nazi attempt to suppress it.
    Owlmirror did not quote it, but the Wikipedia article also mention “Jewish influence” as an argument against Antiqua. In USSR the phenomenon was called “a country with unpredictable past”. (but yes, Semites are to blame for the alphabet)

  64. Lars Mathiesen says

    The Fraktur A still lives as the shop sign of older pharmacies (Apotheke) in Vienna. I can read the black letter that was most commonly used in Danish printing (called gotiske bogstaver just like in Norway) at more or less the same speed as Antiqua-adjacent fonts, while the handwriting in old church record can be more challenging. (But so can the ‘modern’ handwriting that came in about mid-19th, it all depends on the record keeper).

    In 1981, after Rubik’s cube came out (for Christmas 1980, in Denmark at least, so a few months after I sussed out an algorithm myself) I attended a talk at the Copenhagen Mathematical Society where a professor emeritus set out the proper group theoretical thinking — complete with blackboard versions of black letter H and G which are surprisingly similar. (I think G has a kink that H doesn’t). That may have been the last time they graced the blackboards of the H.C Ørsted Institute.

  65. What’s an anti-Semite to do if there turns out to be “Jewish influence” (real or alleged) on both sides of the A v. F issue? Find some other basis on which to make the decision, perhaps?

  66. Just use the Karl Lueger line: “Wer a Jud is, bestimm i!”

  67. Schalansky’s Fraktur mon Amour (Preview here) is a wonderful survey of everything having to do with blackletter, its older history and its present day revival. It comes with lots of fonts, too, specially digitized for that edition.

  68. Sütterlin handwriting is simply indecipherable.
    Learning to read Sütterlin is, to me, similar to learning to read Syriac. Enough of the letters are similar to Hebrew script, and with the aid of a chart and familiarity with Aramaic, it’s relatively easy to get up to speed.

  69. Sütterlin is mostly like Russian handwriting.
    Cf.

    Though usually Russian is softer.

  70. David Marjanović says

    Меня зовут Лизой

    I wasn’t even taught that anymore.

    some capitals (line 1, word 3 and line 2 ,word 3 in this picture) are almost identical.

    Yes, and some of them simply have no discernible relationship to the corresponding Antiqua shapes, so you have to learn them from context. A being U-shaped is just the beginning.

    the house (gér)

    Mongolian! 🙂

    Otto von Bismarck was a keen supporter of German typefaces. He refused gifts of German books in Antiqua typefaces and returned them to sender with the statement Deutsche Bücher in lateinischen Buchstaben lese ich nicht! (I don’t read German books in Latin letters!)

    Too bad for his knowledge of science. Scientific works were usually or always printed in Antiqua, maybe for the benefit of an international audience.

    Of course, I think many/most folks who don’t happen to know the details will guess wrong about which side the Nazis took on Franktur v. Antiqua, because of insufficiently nuanced stereotypes.

    Indeed, the Neonazis themselves are in love with Fraktur (or probably rather gotisch: blackletter in general) because of course most Nazi writings from the 20s through 40s are in Fraktur. (The decree to stop it, in 1941, came during the war, so its implementation was mostly postponed until After Final Victory like everything else.) Consequently, blackletter is skunked: if you use it, people will assume you’re a Nazi unless and until context makes clear that you’re not.

    The nonsense about Schwabacher Judenlettern is known to very few people indeed.

    Find some other basis on which to make the decision, perhaps?

    Or give up and write Modern Standard German in white Elder Futhark runes, using a ridiculous transliteration, on your black jacket. I’ve seen a skinhead wear such a thing.

  71. I was going to express my perplexion with lack of Futhark in Romanticist book printing (if their motivation was love to middle ages and ᛏᚱuly Germanic spirit).

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    The correct way to write Modern Standard German, and indeed all languages, is with the Arabic alphabet. Any distinctions that it doesn’t mark are (by that very token) unimportant.

  73. труЪ (with an incorrect yer) is how some write English word “true” when referring to things like Germanic antiquity and its adepts.

  74. Arabic alphabet.
    rasm
    rasmЪ

  75. Since (per Vennemann) German is full of Semitic anyway, they might as well give up.

  76. David Marjanović says

    I was going to express my perplexion with lack of Futhark in Romanticist book printing (if their motivation was love to middle ages and ᛏᚱuly Germanic spirit).

    Well, runes were associated with Vikings and thus with mordbrennen & brandschatzen, while the Romanticists just wanted to look for the blue flower…

    Any distinctions that it doesn’t mark are (by that very token) unimportant.

    Ah, but the pointing system is open-ended. Arabic letters with four dots have been used in China and Sudan. And the vowels are all spelled out (nowadays) in Uyghur.

  77. David Eddyshaw says

    Hausa Ajami uses the vowel signs, too. It’s actually not a bad fit for Hausa; doesn’t write tones, of course, but then neither does Boko, and nothing terrible happens as a consequence.

    Ajami for Hausa wasn’t ousted from official use because of any actual inadequacy: it really was a British Government plot. (Vigorously opposed by the local missionaries, incidentally. They were sidelined.)

  78. East Caucasian has complex case systems, but very simple verb morphology

    Well…

    The size of the Archi verb paradigm strains credibility: Kibrik calculates that in principle a single verb has 1,502,839 forms (KIBRIK 1998: 466-467). He gives a detailed account of how this number is calculated, and I provide only a brief summary here. The Archi verb has both “basic” tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality forms and related converbs, participles and masdars (verbal nouns), which together come to a total of 12,405 forms for each verb lexeme. It should be borne in mind that this number includes periphrastic forms.
    The Archi verb agrees with the absolutive argument of the clause in gender and number. The masdars can also take case endings. These two factors increase the size of the paradigm to 188,463 forms.
    Furthermore, all finite forms of the Archi verb (including the periphrastic forms) have the potential to acquire the reportative suffix -(e)r (“commentative” in Kibrik’s terminology): I provide some examples in section 3.3. Besides adding to the finite forms, the reportative can serve as a base for further participles.
    There is a special form of the admirative which is produced with the auxiliary verb χos ‘find’. It takes an intermediate position between periphrastic form and free syntactic phrase (KIBRIK 1977b: 239). As such, the admirative is not included in the paradigm count, but its reportative forms are.
    These additional reportative and admirative reportative forms (excluding gender and number distinctions) reach a total of 107,078. When gender/number and case distinctions are taken into account, this number rises to 1,314,376 forms. Added to 188,463 this gives 1,502,839 forms altogether.
    The number of moods on which this count is based is not uncontroversial, and I discuss it in section 3.3.

    https://www.academia.edu/855203/Morphological_complexity_of_Archi_verbs

  79. David Marjanović says

    The size of the Archi verb paradigm strains credibility:

    Oh, stupid me. I knew that. I was only thinking of Chechen somehow.

    Archi also combines an East-Caucasian-style large vowel system with a West-Caucasian-style extremely large consonant system…

  80. I was only thinking of Chechen somehow.

    Happens to all of us.

  81. David Eddyshaw says

    I only ever think of Ingush, myself.

  82. Being multilingual has its problems. In a bind, I only ever think of Pig Latin.

  83. David Marjanović says

    I give up: I can’t find the thread where Y posted the paper that says Tall al-Ḥammām in the Jordan Valley, close to the Dead Sea, was destroyed by a Tunguska-style explosion of a comet in the Middle Bronze Age. Where is it?

  84. January First-of-May says

    Here. I couldn’t find it by googling either, but remembered that it was in a thread that was mostly about the Exodus, and managed to figure out what the name of that thread was.

    This sort of thing is exactly what the Commented-On Posts list used to be really good for back when it worked… hoping it manages to work again.

  85. David Marjanović says

    Oh, yes, thanks!

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