Writing german

The German orthography used in Notker's translation/commentaries and some of his shorter treatises is remarkably systematic when compared with that of other Old High German texts and glosses dating from the same or earlier periods. Unlike Latin, which was bound by the codes of latinitas and for which several orthographic treatises were in circulation, written German had no established spelling tradition. Matters were complicated by the fact that there was no one standard form of the language. OHG consisted of numerous spoken dialects, each with its own phonological, morphological and lexical characteristics, and scribes in the various scriptoria transcribed the language as best they could using the Latin alphabet as a basis – an act that Ernst Hellgardt points out could be “downright violent.” The word for “brother,” for example, appears in early German manuscripts as: bruoder, pruoder, bruodher, brothar, bruader, bruather, proder, pruader and pruadar. Tendencies to regularize German orthography can be seen in the OHG Isidore group of texts, in the Tatian and in Otfrid's Evangelienbuch. It is doubtful, however, that Notker was aware of many of these works if any, since they had been written over a hundred years earlier and in scriptoria far removed from St. Gall. The orthography of some OHG glosses and proper names from St. Gall exhibit the crude beginnings of characteristics found in Notker's own spelling, but these are applied in the vernacular only sporadically.