ASPECTS OF NEW HIGH GERMAN LANGUAGE FORMATION OF THE 18th CENTURY (Gabriel Bodenehr’s Plan of Kamianets-Podilskyi, 1726)

Abstract

The research examines the peculiarities of the formation of the German language in the New High German period using the example of the plan of the Ukrainian city in Podil – Kamianets-Podilskyi. This document was created in 1726 in the city of Augsburg (northern Germany) by the famous German engraver and cartographer Gabriel Bodenehr. The work aims to study the process of the formation of the New High German language at its early stage in historical, cultural, regional and linguistic contexts; to illustrate them on the example of the text of the explication of the city plan. The task of this research is to characterize the peculiarities of the process of normalization of the German language in the New High German period; to determine changes in language levels on the example of the German text of the explanation of the city plan of Kamianets-Podilskyi. To achieve the specified goal and solve the tasks, the following research methods were used: descriptive, comparative-historical, biographical, comparative, and linguistic. As a result of the research, it was found that the text of the plan, although it was written in the New High German period, which is characterized by the desire to create a language standard and the departure from regional dialects, still retains its regional flavour and reference to the written norm of the Viennese chancellery. The conducted research proved that the orthographic and phonetic levels were most affected by the region, where there are significant variations of graphemes in marking the length and shortness of the sound, qualitative changes in vowel sounds, orthographic and graphic features of consonant markings, gravitation to the norms of the Viennese chancellery, as well as a gradual rejection of orthographic norms of the Middle High German period. Certain changes at the morphological level were found in the explication text, which testifies to the formation and consolidation of some grammatical categories (tense forms of verbs, use of passive constructions, declension of nouns and adjectives). The information focus of the text determines its lexical content, which can be seen in the author’s extensive use of anthroponyms (names of architectural and church buildings) and toponyms. The historical and cultural context of the development of the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi is reflected in the author’s use of proper names (names of historical figures, religious orders, political and military groups) and a significant number of borrowings from French, Turkish/Arabic, Latin, and Italian languages. It has been established that the syntactic level is the most normalized and closest to the modern German language. Therefore, the conducted linguistic analysis of the text of the city plan testified that in the first half of the 18th century, there was no complete unification of the written norm of the German literary language. However, separate attempts were made to standardize it. Among the promising research areas, it is worth conducting a comparative analysis of other city plans of this period in order to identify common features in the development of the German language.

Keywords

• new high german period
• explication of the city plan
• linguistic level
• language norm
• variability