Upper German past tense fading

As a top German Präteritumschwund , more rarely alone Präteritumsschwund, refers to the disappearance of the past tense in the Upper German ( Alemannic and Bavarian ) and some central German dialects . In certain regions of this linguistic area, the copula sein and some auxiliary and modal verbs still have simple past tenses, in others such as Alemannic Swiss German the past tense has been completely replaced by the perfect . Kaj Lindgren notes that the past tense has been retreating in favor of the perfect tense in Upper German since the 13th century; for the dialects of the high Alemannic this process was done by Ruth Jörg mainly in the 16th century, with individual traces of Präteritumsformen the maximum Alemannische until the 19th century ( Bernese Oberländisch ) and 20th centuries ( Saleydeutsch ) are tangible.

Various factors are named as the reason for this failure:

• the Upper German apocope , i.e. the disappearance of the ending e in the preterital forms of the 3rd person singular and thus the consonance of present and preterite in the most common verbal form of everyday language, e.g. B. he lives - he lives e > he lives - he lives
• the conversion of the dental suffix -t- to a pure conjunctive marker , which forced the function of the preterital marker to be abandoned, e.g. B. he lived (Ind. Praet.) Vs. he lived (Konj. Praet.), according to the apocope: he lives (Ind. Pres.) vs. he lives (conj.)
• the appearance of a compound or analytical preterital form, namely the perfect, from Middle High German. Only then could the formerly only preterital form, namely the synthetic imperfect, be dispensed with without having to give up the category of tense in linguistic expression.

In Upper German there is essentially only one preterital form, namely the perfect with the auxiliary verbs haben und sein, to which the double perfect is added. The synthetic subjunctive is also used more frequently than in other German dialects , which have mostly given up this mode in order to avoid a coincidence with the simple past.

literature

• Robert Peter Ebert, Oskar Reichmann , Hans-Joachim Solms, Klaus-Peter Wegera: Early New High German Grammar. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1993 (collection of short grammars of Germanic dialects A. 12), p. 388 f. (Research overview with further literature).
• Hanna Fischer: Shrinking past tense in the dialects of Hesse. A re-measurement of the preterital boundary (s) . In: Michael Elmentaler, Markus Hundt, Jürgen E. Schmidt (Eds.): German dialects. Concepts, problems, fields of action. Files of the 4th Congress of the International Society for Dialectology of German (IGDD). Stuttgart 2014. Journal for Dialectology and Linguistics, supplements.
• Gertrud Frei: Walser German in Saley. Examinations of the word content of the dialect and worldview of the ancient settlement Salecchio / Saley (Antigoriotal). Haupt, Bern / Stuttgart 1970 (Language and Poetry 18), pp. 362–371 (considerations on the shrinking of the past tense from the perspective of the only Upper German dialect in which this has been completely absent; see Alemannische Grammatik # Tempus ).
• Ruth Jörg : Investigations into the shrinkage of the past tense in Swiss German . Francke, Bern 1976 (Basler Studies on German Language and Literature, 52).
• Jean Langenberg: The shrinking of the past tense in the German literary language: A comparison of the literature of the 18th and 21st centuries . AV Akademikerverlag, Saarbrücken 2012.
• Kaj Lindgren: About the Upper German shrinking past tense. Helsinki 1957 (Acta Academiae Scientiarum Fennica B.112 / 1).
• Anthony Rowley : The simple past in today's German dialects . In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 50th year, H. 2 (1983), pp. 161-182.
• Pavel Trost: Decay of the past and the shrinking of the past in German . In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 47th year, H. 2 (1980), pp. 184-188.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ruth Jörg: Investigations on the shrinkage of the past tense in Swiss German. Bern 1976, especially pp. 174–185.