Fun with Germanic historical linguistics ...

A normal mortal can only respond to that subject line with "fun ≠ Germanic historical linguistics", but Germanic historical linguists are not normal, I suppose. This blog has a tradition of historical linguistic geekery (start here and read from there). Time for an update ...

A crew of people  at the Universität Tübingen in Germany have assembled a pretty remarkable set of Merkverse for learning key bits of historical phonology and morphology of German and Germanic. A Merkvers can be translated as 'mnemonic rhyme' or something, but that doesn't do it justice ... there's a long tradition going back to the earliest writings in German of these little rhymes. (The image here, from here, is of one for the Runic alphabet.)

You really have to know German to get these, but one of the things you have to do with earlier Germanic languages is learn the series of strong verbs, seven classes from ride, rode, ridden and sing, sang, sung, and so on. Here's the one for that for Old High German (there's another one for Middle High German):

Althochdeutsche Merkwörter für die Ablautreihen

rîtan, zîhan, solcherlei —stehen in der ersten Reih'.
liogan und ziohan —schließt die zweite Reihe an.
Willst die Reihe drei du findan, —denk an werfan und an bindan.
neman, stelan, wissen wir, —passen nur in Reihe vier.
geban wird ganz ungeniert —in der Reihe fünf notiert.
graban, slahan, dies Gewaechs —kennen wir in Reihe sechs.
haltan und der Rest, Ihr Lieben, —hat redupliziert in sieben.

(aus Osnabrück?)

 If you're a student of the history of German, your life just got a little more fun.

And a big wag of the monk's habit to pr. (Or whatever you do with a monk's habit.)

Tattúínárdœla saga: Outgeek THIS

Recently, I posted something on graffiti at the University of Chicago in a variety of often-obscure languages (here), suggesting that our Wisconsin students needed to fly the geek flag here. In response to the post, Janet S. commented:

UChicago outgeeks all rivals. Wisconsin is not even on UChicago's radar of geekery.

On being asked about the topic, various colleagues and students report a range of obscure graffiti around campus. (Our contributor Joe got nervous that when he called attention to that post that some students might now be inspired to produce new graffiti — probably in Gothic, Runic and Old High German, knowing what he's teaching these days. Not the intent, obviously.)

Just as I was starting to worry that Janet S. might be closer to right than I'm able to concede, people told me about this, which is aptly captured by the blog's title and subtitle:

Tattúínárdœla saga
Yes, this is Star Wars in Old Norse.

A grad student from Wisconsin — hear me now, believe me later — is translating Star Wars into saga form and writing it in Old Norse, even providing an English translation. Reports are that the Old Norse is very good.

I can only stare in slack-jawed wonder at this stunning exercise. Thank you, Jackson Crawford, thank you for rescuing Wisconsin's geek cred. Your work clearly pushes the geekvelope, redlines the geekometer and opens whole new vistas in geekmacation. Above all, it's thrown down a Star Wars gauntlet to other schools and other language heads. And, yes, the image is from an ad and you can buy them, here. (And to the missus, my birthday is coming up.)

And here's hoping that things in present-day Iceland settle down quickly. For the pressing language angle on the volcanic eruption, see this on the Log.