Old High German

Old High German (Althochdeutsch) is the name given to the language in which some texts were written from AD 750 to 1050, including the earliest known written texts in German. 

"German" refers to the language spoken today in Germany, Austria, a large part of Switzerland, and in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, and by about a million people each in France, Italy and the United States -- by about 100 million people worldwide. "Germanic," however, is a much broader term: in addition to German, the Germanic languages spoken today include English, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and others. 

As I said, the earliest written German texts are Old High German. But they are not the earliest written Germanic texts. In the 4th century, Bishop Ulfilas translated the Bible, or least large parts of it, into his native Gothic language. Also in the 4th century, a few other documents were written in Gothic by Ulfilas and/or someone else. And that is all that is known. For whatever reasons, written Gothic did not thrive. 

About a century earlier than Old High German, the earliest known writing in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, appeared, the poem called "Caedmon" after its supposed author.

Now, about the "High" in Old High German. To this day there are High German and Low German (Plattdeutsch). High German is the standard version of the language usually spoken on TV and radio, written by journalists and authors and so forth. Out of the huge number of local German dialects, High German has come to be standard German. But "High" is not a value judgment. It does not connote anything cultural or social at all. Rather, High German is a purely geographical term: it is so called because it comes from mountainous areas, and Low German from regions where the land is flatter and the elevation is lower. 

The earliest Old High German texts are glosses, German synonyms written in the margins of Latin manuscripts, and lists of Latin-synonyms. Then come actual translations, of gospels, of Psalms, of earlier Christian writers, occasionally even of "pagan" Latin Classics. There are official pronouncements of Frankish rulers, pieces of the liturgy, passion plays, magical formulas. There is the Hildebrandslied, a tragic story of a battle between a father and son, a survival of Germanic oral literature.

Old High German was strongly supported by Charlemagne and his successors. Then, as the Saxons took control in German, there was a century, roughly from AD 900 to 1000, when written German virtually disappeared. Latin had been the dominant written language the entire time, but under the Saxons, Latin's status returned from dominant to exclusive. 

And then, in the first half of the 11th century, in the period of transition from Old High German to Middle High German, the dominant figure in literary German was Notker, also called Notker the German, to distinguish him from the 9th-century Notker the Stutterer, known for his German additions to the liturgy. In addition to purely German works, Notker the German wrote distinctive mixed works, part Latin, part German.

After Notker, beginning around AD 1050 and lasting until about 1350, is the period of the literature referred to as Middle High German, with authors much more well-known and widely-read than anyone in Old High German: for example, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and, perhaps the most prominent Medieval German work, the anonymous Nibelungenlied. Old High German is more foreign, more difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend, often comparatively primitive. Still, it offers fascinating glimpses into the life of the times and places where it was made.

Forgeries, From Antiquity to the Present

Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown. 

Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.

 

In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch. 

More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.

Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.

The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,

Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open. 

It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus. 

The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.

Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island. 

As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.

So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.

Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake. 

Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.

Will Musk Destroy His Own Success?

The thing about Musk is, he's always talking about himself, and he's always lying.

And -- now this is significant -- he's not even particularly good at lying. The thing he does all day long  every day, and he's not good at it. So people notice.

 

He keeps alienating one significant demographic after another. He refers to himself as an engineering genius, but any actual engineer can easily see that he's faking being an engineer, and taking the credit for the work of many engineers who've worked for him. How many engineers are there in the world? A job at Tesla used to be a dream destination for many engineering students. It surely is much less so than it once was. Less than outstanding pay, a boss who takes credit for everything you do, the risk of being rage-fired at any moment for no good reason...

He claims he's autistic, and we autistic people can easily see he's not. So can psychologists who specialize in the autistic spectrum, and family members and friends of autistic people. As one of those psychologists recently put it, we're not saying that autistic people can't be assholes. We can be. But even the assholes among us tend to care very much about improving our situation through accurate understanding of our condition. Musk trying to piggy-back on us, why? So people will feel sorry for him and more inclined to forgive his bad behavior? It's deeply annoying on several levels, even before we get to those of his fans who are trying the same thing.

Ha says he was bullied as a child. I imagine that people who actually were bullied as children, or who care about children whom have been or are being being bullied, can see pretty easily that he's a bully.

He says he was poor when he was young, saying, for example, that he had to live on a dollar a day as a undergrad, and that he often had nothing to eat but ramen noodles, but it's come out that his family owned an emerald mine. He has also talked publicly about the private plane his family owned when he was a child.

If you want people to believe you were poor as a child, and you're a good liar, or even a very mediocre liar, you don't talk about things like the family's private plane.

So let's see. So far we've got engineers, autistic people, victims of bullying and poor people, all of of whom Musk has given reason to take a particular personal dislike toward him. And how many more groups has he alienated in exactly the same way, just by unnecessary lies about himself? It's adding up. That's even before we get to his spectacularly bad behavior as an employer, executive and businessman.