This paper demonstrates the rise of a new distinction in the first-person plural pronouns in Jerusalemite Yiddish, a contemporary dialect of Yiddish spoken in Israel by ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews. The distinction is semantically-pragmatically motivated, where a particular pronoun is used to refer to a specific subgroup of “us” compared with “them.” This innovation evolved as a result of both dialect contact and of the special sociolinguistic characteristics of the Haredi community in Israel. A rare phenomenon in the languages of the world, it reflects the unique self-imposed seclusion that is the social reality of speakers of Haredi Yiddish.*

It is not uncommon for the naive native speaker of English to confuse German and Dutch. One reason for this lies in the English names for the languages, but another reason is that Dutch and German sound similar to the anglophone ear. Many, perhaps even most, university students of Dutch in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the anglophone world come to Dutch with a good knowledge of German and again, often draw parallels between their mother tongue, and Dutch and German. Of course, professional linguists know that English and German are neighbors of Dutch and members of the same Germanic language family. However, comments by naive native speakers serve to highlight questions about the typological contrasts between these three languages.

This paper is a synchronic investigation of verbal complex phenomena in the West Central German dialects. The types of verbal complexes attested in 187 recordings of West Central German from the Zwirner Corpus are first classified and analyzed. A GoldVarb analysis reveals that in subordinate clause two-verb complexes, the factor groups syntagm and verbal prefix type have statistically significant effects on word order, while in main clause two-verb complexes the factor groups syntagm, verbal prefix type, and a grammatical correlate to focus have statistically significant effects. Taking as a point of departure Lötscher 1978 and Sapp 2007, a multi-causal account of verbal complex pheno-mena involving grammatical, functional, and performance factors is developed, with a close examination of the role of language processing in verbal complex formation. Following Hawkins' (1994, 2004) notions of Early Immediate Constituents and Minimize Domains, it is argued that the type of verbal complex known as Verb Projection Raising can be linked in part to an advantage in language production. The paper concludes with a discussion of the speaker-hearer dichotomy as it relates to German clausal structure and the role of interfaces in the analysis of verbal complexes.*

Co-compounds (sometimes termed “copulative compounds”) are com-pounds whose elements are of equivalent status and which can be glossed as having coordinated meaning (usually linked by and, but occasionally, in some languages, by or). There are several distin-guishable kinds of co-compounds, including dvandvas, appositional compounds, co-participant compounds, and so on (Wälchli 2005, Bauer 2008a). These were not available in early Germanic. Accordingly, co-compounds in modern Germanic languages are innovations, and it is scarcely surprising to see that there is much agreement about the types that are available. However, this apparent unity hides a host of differ-ences across languages. This paper focuses on the differences between Danish, English, and German in the use of co-compounds.*

The standard view that thematic verba pura contained Proto-Germanic j is examined in detail and rejected: we must reconstruct PG +sē1e/a- +rōe/a-, not +sē1je/a- +rōje/a-. The Gmc. verba pura typically have stems ending in ē1 (Go. saian, OE sāwan, ON sā, OHG sāen ‘sow’) or ō (OE rōwan, ON rōa ‘row’). While ō in these verbs seems always to reflect PIE o + a non-coloring laryngeal E, ē1 occurs in verbs with laryngeals of any color: saian <+seE-, OHG krāen ‘crow’ <+greA- (a-coloring), OE cnāwan ‘know’< +ǵneO- (o-coloring). A solution is offered according to which in Germanic, E was lost relatively early, e and o in hiatus were then lengthened to ē1ō, after which remaining o > a. Later, when A and O were lost, a in hiatus was lengthened to ā and reanalyzed as /ē1/. However, +knē1- might instead reflect a Narten present in +ǵnēO-.*

This paper suggests a series of schemas aimed at eliminating the main drawbacks of existing schemas of Yiddish proto-vowels. It attempts to complete the schemas developed by other scholars mainly in two aspects, proposing derivational rules that (1) account for Proto-Western Yiddish and its sub-dialects and (2) explain the relation between the vowels of the German donor language and Yiddish proto-vowels. This analysis shows the impossibility of constructing a schema of a single Proto-Yiddish as a historical reality and thus implies the polygenesis of the system of stressed vowels and diphthongs of Yiddish. Proto-Western Yiddish and Proto-Eastern Yiddish had no common, specifically Jewish ancestor. The comparative analysis of various German dialects and Yiddish proposed here provides the basis for determining the regions (East Franconia and Bohemia, respectively) where the stressed vocalism of the Yiddish dialects likely appeared and the corresponding time period (the 14th–15th centuries).

This paper examines the socio-historical context in which Dutch arose as a result of contact between Frankish and Ingvæonic speakers in the seventh and eighth centuries. I first consider some persistent pitfalls in socio-historical linguistics with regard to better-known instances of language contact in medieval Europe. I review the reflexes of umlaut in Dutch and propose a solution for this long-standing problem in terms of language contact. Finally, the linguistic analysis is placed in a social and historical context, with special attention to the role of slavery in creating the context for the linguistic developments that took place.*

The dialect geography and etymology of Dutch, Frisian, and German trVm(e) ‘crossbeam’ suggest that western Dutch triem continues West Germanic +‑ǣ-, which underwent vowel raising to /i./ as in Frisian. Thus, Dutch traam beside triem belongs to an established group of Standard Dutch words showing /a./ next to /i./ from West Germanic +‑ǣ-, such as schraal vs. schriel. It is argued that the survival of words in /i./ in the coastal dialects of Dutch fits into recent theories that Standard Dutch is the result of language contact between medieval Frisian and Franconian.*

Gothic scribes divided words at the ends of lines following basic principles of syllabification except in the case of glide-final clusters, where the division appeared immediately before the glide (-C/G-). Pierce (2006) accepts this practice as evidence that such sequences were heterosyllabified, -C.G-. He rejects arguments that such breaks occur because morpheme boundaries (#) normally precede the glides, -VC0C/#GV-, and that hence these clusters were actually tauto-syllabified: -VC0.C#GV-. Pierce counters that (a) the Law of Initials forbids such tautosyllabification; (b) morphology cannot account for similar division in forms evincing Verschärfung or /-ngw-/, where there are no morpheme boundaries; (c) his opponents are inconsistent because they ignore the role of morphology in the division of stop + liquid clusters; (d) evidence from the other Germanic dialects cor-roborates his position; (e) if -VC0CGV- were truly tautosyllabified, one would expect occasionally to find erroneous divisions exhibiting this, -VC0/.C#GV-. In this rejoinder, I argue that Pierce's arguments rest on false premises.

This paper describes the organization of the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP), which aims to document and archive the remnants of Texas German. The mission of the TGDP is (a) to document Texas German as it reflects the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of its residents; (b) to gather basic research information about linguistic diversity; (c) to provide linguistic information for public and educational interests, and (d) to use the collected materials for the improvement of educational programs. The paper gives a brief histor-ical overview of the development of the Texas German community and then describes the workflow of the TGDP. We also discuss how the Texas German Dialect Archive (TGDA) is currently used for linguistic research on new dialect formation, language contact, and language death. Since the open-ended sociolinguistic interviews contain a wealth of information on the history and cultural practices of the Texas German community, the archive is also of interest to historians and anthropologists. Finally, we show how the archive has been used for community outreach programs throughout central Texas.*

We investigated strong-verb paradigm leveling in German, Dutch, English, and Swedish, and found significant differences in ablaut leveling and class change towards the weak conjugation. Swedish favors ablaut patterns retaining a difference between the preterite and the past participle, while German, Dutch, and English favor a common vowel for both forms. In change from the strong to the weak conjugation in Swedish, the preterite is more resistant than the past participle, while in the other languages it is the reverse. We provide a unified explanation for these facts based on differences in category frequency due to the prominence or lack of an aspectual distinction between preterite and perfect.*

This article examines a remarkable case of analogy in the verbal systems of German and Dutch which to date has hardly received any attention. In both languages, the ablaut pattern that originally stems from the second Germanic ablaut class (“oPRETERITE = oPAST PARTICIPLE”) spread to other strong verbs by analogy, as in German heben–hob–gehoben or Dutch binden–bond–gebonden. It is argued that the low token frequency of these verbs triggered this analogy. As in both cases a new type of ablaut class arises through the convergence of several strong verbs, I refer to it as the eighth ablaut class.*