Answering back in Old High German

John L. Flood

(received April 2000)

Contents

1. Introduction
   
2. ‘Answer’ in the older Germanic Languages
   
3. ‘Answer’ in the OHG Tatian text
   
4. Sectionalisation of the Text
   
5. Dialect and Dating as Factors
   
6. Bibliography

1. Introduction

‘Answering back’, parents always tell their children, is rude. Rudeness seems to have been endemic in Old High German. We all remember not only Hadubrant’s insult to his father but also the offensive racial jibe in the Kassel glosses: Tole sint Uualha, spahe sint Peigira: luzic ist spahi in Uualhum, mera hapent tolaheiti denne spahi. Then there are the tenth-century Altdeutsche Gespräche with the famous interchange about staying in bed with one’s woman instead of going to Mass, not to mention the pungent retort: Vndes ars in tine naso or the dismissive E minen terua ne roche be taz (in fide non curo quod dicis) ‘to be sure, I don’t care what you say’.

2. ‘Answer’ in the older Germanic Languages

However, this paper is not concerned with ‘answering back’ in Old High German but rather with ‘answering’ back in Old High German. What I propose to examine is the lexical field of ‘to answer’ with special reference to one particular text.

If we first of all consider the verbs for ‘to answer’ in the old Germanic languages generally, we find quite a range. For all that Köbler (1980: 86 and 183) gives only *ankwethan as the Germanic equivalent of Modern German ‘antworten’ and ‘widersprechen’, the individual old Germanic languages had a variety of words to express these notions. Indeed, in another of Köbler’s curious books, the oddly titled Lateinisch-germanistisches Lexikon (surely Lateinisch-germanisches is meant!) under respondere we find the following entry:

As for the noun ‘answer’, under responsio he gives:

and under responsum:

En passant, let us note the grouping of the Germanic languages here: ON and OE go together in using a word cognate with our answer, and this word is attested also as a noun in OS. OS and OHG go together in using a word cognate with Modern German antworten, which also occurs in Gothic, albeit rarely. Gothic stands alone in using andhafjan, and OHG is likewise unique in using antalengen, antlingen, antlingon.

Of course, the Latin verb may on occasions correspond to a noun + verb combination; for example, respondere is rendered by antuurti geban in Tatian 85,3 (Köhler 1914: 141). Furthermore, verbs other than respondere can be used in Latin in the meaning of ‘answer’. Thus in Notker, but here only, we find dicere and inquam being rendered by antwurten, while loqui is apparently never so translated. In the Germanic languages, too, the verbs ‘to answer’ often compete with simple verbs of saying, just as we today sometimes use ‘say’ as an alternative to ‘answer’, ‘reply’ or ‘respond’. Which of these verbs we use in English depends on register or on context: ‘respond’ is higher style, perhaps more characteristic of written English, whereas ‘answer’ is the more general word, with ‘reply’ standing somewhere in between. They are not always strictly synonymous. Similarly with Modern German antworten and entgegnen.

Lexical variation in the verbs for ‘to answer’ was, of course, a feature of the individual old Germanic languages too; that is evident from Köbler’s lists cited above. In Gothic, for example, andhafjan occurs 138 times but andwaurdjan only once (Romans 9,20, in the sense of widersprechen, ‘retort’) (Köbler 1989: 53; 1990a: 5; 1990b: 7). In Old Saxon, in the Heliand, as well as andwordian we find angegin sprekan (Köbler 1972: 48). For OHG Köbler lists the attested equivalents of Latin respondere and the corresponding nouns as follows:

In OHG the usual word is antuuurten (sometimes spelled with only two u’s, or sometimes with vvu). However, the Tatian translation, written it is generally accepted in the 830s or at any rate in the second quarter of the ninth century at Fulda in the East Franconian dialect, twice as frequently and uniquely uses another verb, antlingen or antlingôn. It also contains a few examples of a variant verb antalengen, and this provides an interesting link with just one other OHG text, the Alemannic translation of the Benedictine Rule, in which the verb antlengen occurs four times:

The Benedictine Rule uses the verb antwurten only once:

Daab rightly points out (1959: 10, note 11) that antuurti is an imperative form, unlike respondeas, though in the Latin-OHG glossary on p. 294 she raises the question whether antuurti is here perhaps a noun, presumably with the verb ‘to give’ (kip) understood. Even discounting that possibility, it is quite clear that — albeit that the statistical basis is very slender — antlengan is markedly more frequent in the Benediktinerregel than is antwurten. The noun antwurti is attested three times: twice (fols. 36 and 148) to render responsum and once (fol. 82) to render responsio. The Benedictine Rule offers no instances of a noun related to the verb antlengan, though that such a noun did exist is evident from its occurrence in a few Upper German Biblical glosses. The Latin word responsum is glossed as antlangi in the late eighth or early ninth-century Paris manuscript (Codex Parisinus 7640 of the Bibliothèque nationale), as antlenki in the late eighth-century Codex St Gallen 911, the famous ‘Abrogans’ manuscript (in either case apparently as an alternative to antuuurti/antuurti) (Steinmeyer/Sievers 1968: I, 91, no. 31 and I, 91, no. 31 respectively), while responsa is glossed with antlenki in Cod. St Gallen 911 and as antlengi in Karlsruhe Cod. Aug CXI (Steinmeyer/Sievers 1968: I, 218, no. 11). Steinmeyer, and following him Ehrismann, regarded this as a tenth-century manuscript, but Preisendanz and Baesecke held that it belongs to the ninth century, possibly as early as 802 (Bostock 1976: 92-96). This view is possibly supported by the fact that the relics of antlingen/antlenki etc. are, as we have seen, otherwise generally associated with eighth and early ninth-century texts.

As a passing thought, I wonder whether the distribution of antlingen and antuurten and related forms was affected by the relative frequency of a homophone, the adjective antwurti which, for instance, in the Benedictine Rule occurs three times (fols 39, 41, 103) as an alternative to antwarti (four occurrences, fols 69, 128, 144, 149) meaning praesens ‘present’ (cf. also Sievers 1888: 113).

This review of the occurrence of antlingen and related forms gives the curious picture of the noun being attested exclusively in Upper German, while the verb forms are found in Alemannic and in East Franconian. Obviously this picture may simply be due to a quirk of the transmission — after all even the four occurrences of the nouns in the glosses really represent only two distinct incidences since we are dealing with parallel transmission in different manuscripts. Had a more extensive corpus of OHG survived it is at least possible that a different picture would have emerged. As it is, both verb and noun are attested only in eighth or earlier ninth-century monuments, and neither is found either in later OHG, let alone in MHG. Nevertheless, they have distant relatives in North Sea Germanic languages and in ON to the extent that, as Sievers showed, antlingen/antlingôn must be related to a word *antlang, not actually attested in OHG but with cognate forms in OS (cf. andlang (Heliand 4225)), OE, OFris. and ON, and Low German entlang is another. anda-, and- is an adverb of direction, and and-lang means ‘entgegen reichend, entgegen gewendet’. The noun *antlangi, antlenki therefore means ‘Entgegnung’ (Sievers 1888: 112; see also Lloyd/Springer 1988ff.: I, 277-80, and for the etymology of antwurten I, 287-9). Thus the evidence strongly suggests that we are dealing with Reliktbelege of a root that once possibly had a wide geographical currency in the German-speaking area.

3. ‘Answer’ in the OHG Tatian text

Here I propose to re-examine the use of antlingen/antlingôn in the Tatian translation and see how it compares with that of antuuurten in the same monument, having regard at the same time to the way in which their usage relates to the Latin. Fortunately the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch has covered the letter A, so full details of both verbs, with lists of occurrences of the various forms, may be readily found there, as indeed they may in Sievers’s glossary and Köbler’s Lateinisch-althochdeutsches Wörterbuch.

The distribution of the two groups of verbs antalengen / antlingen / antlingôn and antwurten / giantwurten over the whole Tatian text is as follows:

If we now merge the two groups to see if there are any particular concentrations of one form or the other we find the following distribution (distinguished thus: ANTLINGEN group; ANTUURTEN group, with the change from one form to the other being indicated by a new line for the sake of additional clarity)

The St Gallen Tatian manuscript, G, is believed to have been written by seven scribes, or six with an overseer who seems mainly to have corrected the punctuation (Masser 1991: 115). Their writing stints are thought to have been as follows (Sievers 1892: XII; see also Masser 1991: 101):

Now of course if G were the original manuscript of the translation, correlation of the scribes’ stints and the distribution of antlingen/antwuurten forms could be very revealing indeed. However, though written at Fulda (Masser 1991: 92) where the translation was made, G is not the original but a ninth-century copy (Sievers 1892: XXII-XXIII and LXX), possibly made as a gift for St Gallen (de Boor 1960: 45; Masser 1991: 107), though its presence there is attested only since the thirteenth century (Masser 1991: 108f.). Thus the extent of the scribal stints cannot give us reliable information about the original translator(s) — it would perhaps only be important if the scribes were not mere copyists but editors of the text. Their interventions were mostly of an orthographical or morphological, scarcely however of a lexical nature. This becomes evident if we compare the St Gallen manuscript, G, with the only other major textual witness of the Tatian translation, known as B. B was a manuscript, probably contemporary with G, that belonged to Bonaventura Vulcanius in 1597. In his day it already had a large gap between 76,1 and 153,1, and today it apparently no longer survives at all. Fortunately however, Vulcanius made a copy of it and this copy was found by Franciscus Junius the Younger among the papers of Marquard Freher in Heidelberg in 1653; Junius took it to England, and it is now preserved as MS Junius 13 in the Bodleian Library. On the basis of this Johann Philipp Palthen prepared a printed edition which he published under the title Tatiani Alexandrini Harmoniae Evangelicae antiquissima Versio Theotisca at Greifswald in 1706. As Peter Ganz, who brought out a facsimile of this in 1993, relates, though Sievers, who was only twenty at the time, collated the Oxford manuscript in 1870 he decided that MS Junius 13 depended entirely on the St Gallen text and could, therefore, safely be disregarded. But Ganz continues (1993: xvi): "If he had been able to spend more time in Oxford he would, no doubt, have noticed that neither the Latin nor the Old High German text of MS Junius 13 are wholly derived from the St Gall manuscript […] With all its inadequacies, the Oxford manuscript does retain some importance as an independent witness […] A new edition of the Old High German Diatessaron will have to take note of the variants of the Junius transcript." It is not entirely clear how G and B are related to one another. As I have mentioned, whereas Sievers thought B was copied from G, Ganz has shown that they are independent witnesses, but whether they are copies of the archetype or copies of a copy of the archetype eludes us. As far as the incidence of antlingen and antwuurten forms is concerned, the differences are slight. Based on Palthen, whose transcription is not always reliable, we find only the following:

At all other points the reading of B (after Palthen) and G is identical (in form, if not always in spelling). Most of these variants are unremarkable, but attention must be drawn to the four cases 3,7, 159,6, 199,7 and 225,1 where each time G has a preterite form while B is apparently closer to the Latin in using a present participle (respondens in the Latin). ‘Apparently’ is, however, the crucial word here, for examination of MS Junius 13 itself shows that Palthen’s edition is misleading at these points, for at all these points Vulcanius’s erasures indicate that he was attempting to ‘improve’ the German text by making it agree more closely with the Latin — in other words, at least here B seems to present readings edited by a sixteenth-century hand rather than genuine ninth-century ones. Again in the case of 225,1 (but not in 217,5 or 236,2) the manuscript and Palthen read antling- rather than antaleng- as in G, but this may perhaps be yet another instance of Vulcanius ‘improving’ the text. The only really interesting reading here is 161,4 where Vulcanius has Tho quad ther Heilant while G has antlingita; but in view of the general messiness of MS Junius 13 at this point one cannot be certain whether quad really was the reading of Vulcanius’s source or represents further sixteenth-century contamination. But be that as it may, the important point is that, notwithstanding any minor differences between G and B, with the single exception of 161,4 where B reads quad, B always has antlingen (etc.) where G has it and similarly it always has antuurten (etc.) where G has it. Neither in B nor in G, therefore, was any attempt made to obliterate the distribution of these words. The lexical variation was then, it seems, a feature of the Fulda original, and any irregularities in lexical frequency must reflect the circumstances of the composition of the original translation, and indeed Sievers, a century ago, already noted "daß wir es nicht mit dem einheitlichen Werk éines Verfassers, sondern mit einer gemeinschaftlichen Arbeit mehrerer Hände zu tun haben" (Sievers 1892: LXX). Since the original does not survive we have no way of knowing where the stints of the scribe-translators fell precisely, though Sievers and Steinmeyer believed that they could determine the approximate extent of each translator’s contribution on the basis of certain lexical features, one of which was antlingen/antuurten, while another was how the Latin conjunctions autem, sed, vero and quod, quia, quoniam were rendered.

This of course assumes that we know what the Latin source text was like. As Baumstark (1964: 4) emphasized, it is essential for us to be clear about the nature of the source before we can make any valid statements about the translation. It is now generally recognised that the Latin text accompanying the OHG in the St Gallen manuscript is not the source for the German, thus any statements based on a comparison of these are misguided. As Rathofer rightly puts it (in Baumstark 1964: XI-XII), "ohne die Wiederherstellung der wirklichen Vorlage werden sich in Zukunft nicht einmal mehr ernsthafte diskutierbare Vermutungen über diese Frage aufstellen lassen". However, Rathofer has himself shown that the Latin in the St Gallen manuscript is in fact not so far removed from the Latin text on which the OHG translation is based. Furthermore, we can be certain that the translators strove to remain as faithful as possible to the Latin original; they were after all translating the Holy Scriptures and in such a text, as St Jerome himself put it, even the word order contained a divine mystery (Ganz 1969: 75). But, of course, Wissmann is right to point out (1960: 254) that there were three possible constraints on achieving absolute accuracy: 1. the innate inability of the target language to imitate particular features of the source language; 2. inadequate knowledge of the source language on the part of the translator; and 3. simple errors and inaccuracies on the part of the translator.

Given that the Latin source of the Tatian translation was not identical with the St Gallen Latin text but nevertheless was evidently not so very different from it, if we compare the St Gallen German text and Oxford Junius 13 we can be reasonably confident of what its actual Latin source looked like. At least we should be able to see whether they both render Latin respondere in the same way.

Already Sievers (1872) argued that it was possible on the basis of analysing the patterning of the lexis to distinguish the work of different translators. This thesis was discussed by Steinmeyer (1873) who came to somewhat different conclusions. Later Sievers indicated that he accepted certain of Steinmeyer’s conclusions, and in particular that they were more or less agreed that the translators’ stints coincided with the following chapters: 45; 67; 104; 119; 135; 146; and 175 (Sievers 1892: LXXI). This division into eight sections is essentially only a broad-brush approach, but if for the moment we accept the Sievers-Steinmeyer scheme, superimposing it on our earlier distribution pattern of the ANTLINGEN and ANTWURTEN groups, the result is as follows:

In summary, the following picture emerges:

This shows that sections III and IV, i.e. chapters 67-119, are markedly out of character with the rest of the work. This raises the question of whether we can detect any characteristic difference in the usage of the two sets of verbs in these sections, especially perhaps in relation to the Latin lemmata. Basically, the question is how do the German words relate to Latin respondens and respondit. The following analysis shows the position in some detail.

The only instances in this section where the OHG does not reproduce the Latin form are 121,2, 123,3 and 127,5 where the present participle is rendered by a preterite.

Rather as in Section I, the rarer form of respondere is rendered by antuurten.

Of interest here is that in the two sentences where ‘answer’ occurs twice, the translator uses antlingen once and antuurten once (189,4 and 198,4). (A similar juxtaposition is found also at 17,5-17,6 and 104,5-104,6.). The other point worthy of note is that antuurten tends to be used to render the less common Latin forms: that is, to render the imperative, the subjunctive and the future, whereas antlingen is almost always used to render stock phrases like Respondit Ihesus or Respondens Ihesus dixit — Tho antlingita ther heilant. Is it becoming formulaic, therefore? It is perhaps worth noting about antlingen that it occurs only in the infinitive; present participle; 2nd and 3rd sg. and 3 plur. present tense; 2nd and 3rd sg. and 3rd plur, preterite; in contrast, antwurten is attested in a wider range of forms, 1st person sg. and plur. and subjunctive forms, for instance.

antalengita only occurs at the end — is it the same translator? It can hardly be decisive because in 104,5 we find antlingita and antelengita in the same paragraph. This variation becomes even more remarkable when we observe that in the very next sentence (104,6) respondit is rendered by antuurtita. Has this translator recognised the monotony of the Latin formula Respondit ... et dixit and tried to vary it in German by putting Tho antlingita ... inti quad, Tho antelengita ... inti quad, and Tho antuurtita ... into quad? There is no clear evidence of semantic discrimination between the two verbs, though Lühr has argued an interesting case for detecting a degree of stylistic distinction in their usage (1980: 58-68, especially 62-8).

Table 1 summarizes the distribution. Once again, ANTLINGEN and related forms are printed in bold. Rows 1 and 2 relate to infinitive forms, rows 3-12 to present participles (respondens/respondentes), rows 13-20 to the 3rd person sg. and plur. perfect forms (respondit/responderunt), and rows 21-33 to the other forms of respondere.

Table 1

This table focuses narrowly on the German verb and the Latin form to which it corresponds. However, the wider syntactical context needs to be considered. The Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch helpfully separates out the different syntactical patterns (cols 551-2). Here I will confine myself to the way in which antlingen is collocated with quedan (see also Mourek 1897:33-4).

Under (c) here, where antlingen and quedan appear in parallel as finite verbs, as antlingita ... quad, the corresponding Latin phrase consists of present participle and finite verb, respondens ... ait/dixit, never of two finite forms. It is noteworthy that all nine instances fall between 138,8 and 199,12, that is, in Sievers’s sections VI, VII, VIII.

Under (d)(i), the German pattern Tho antlingita ... inti quad (sometimes plural Tho antlingitun ... inti quadun, with a single example of the present tense 152,7 Thanne antlingent si inti quedent) corresponds to various Latin structures:

Though the Tho antlingita ... inti quad pattern is widely distributed throughout the translation it occurs particularly frequently between 119 and and 155 (in sections V, VI and VII), and especially between 131,3 and and 140,1 (in sections V and VI).

4. Sectionalisation of the Text

Of course, the usefulness of these findings as a criterion for throwing light on the way in which the translation was produced depends on the validity of the Sievers-Steinmeyer sectionalisation of the translation, and therein lies the crux. Unfortunately this question cannot be dealt with in much detail here. As we have seen, Sievers already recognised that the translation was not the work of a single translator, and though that view has been disputed, albeit unpersuasively, there is no agreement as to how many translators were involved. In 1872 Sievers spoke of being able to distinguish nine pairs of hands (Arbeiter) largely on the basis of the ways in which conjunctions were handled. Steinmeyer (1873) distinguished twenty-three sections though how many different translators this implied is not clear. Dietz (1893) argued that the translators changed at 49,3; 77,3; 103,2; 186,4, and Köhler, in discussing Dietz’s work, mentions (1914: VIII) that he himself had independently concluded that the translators changed at 49,3 and 103,2, and at 77,1 or 77.5 (rather than at 77,3) and 185,10 or 187,5 (instead of Dietz’s 186,4). However, Köhler went much further, distinguishing 266 sections, "womit", in Rathofer’s words (in Baumstark 1964: XI, note 16), "die Absurdität dieser Untersuchungsmethode demonstriert wurde". Köhler thought that the 266 sections might be explained by imagining that there had been a team of translators taking turns, perhaps working for an hour at a time, the whole project being directed by one person who specified how the main concepts were to be translated. Taylor Starck (1930: 202) thought that Köhler’s estimate of about ten to fifteen translators was about right. Leo Kramp (1918) postulated fourteen sections without insisting on more than seven or eight translators. Ewald Erb (1963: 246) speaks of being able to distinguish "bis zu einem halben Dutzend Mitarbeiter", though it is not clear whether he is confusing the translators with the scribes of St Gallen 56. Helmut de Boor (1960: 45) describes the translation, alliteratingly, as "Gemeinschaftswerk einer Gruppe Gleichstrebender". Georg Baesecke (Merker/Stammler 1925: I, 31) and Werner Betz (Merker/Stammler 1958: I, 24), for their part, speak vaguely of a "Schar von Mönchen" who participated in the work. Baesecke’s pupil Ernst Schröter (1926) wanted to identify scribe g, who wrote 82,11-103,5, with Walahfrid Strabo who was in Fulda from 827-829, but this was refuted by Bernhard Bischoff (1950), which is of course not to say that Walahfrid could not have been one of the original translators. Be that as it may, Bischoff was doubtless right to believe that the number of monks present at the same time in Fulda who were capable of translating a Latin gospel text into German will have been very small indeed (Wissmann 1960: 266). And indeed some have argued that the translation is the work of a single translator, Arens (1897), for instance, and Wunderlich (1894) who considered the variations no greater than those within Notker’s translation of Boethius, the unity of which has never been challenged. And R. H. Lawson’s study of weak verbs in Tatian "reinforces doubts as to the validity of the multi-scribal theory" [by which he means multi-translator] and "supports the alternative concept of a single scribe [i.e. translator] or a compelling single-scribal influence in OHG Tatian" (1979: 40-41).

Taylor Starck analysed the sectionalisations proposed and arrived at the following picture (1930: 191):

I am not intending to discuss these proposals further; I would simply comment that only those beginning at 135,1 and 146,1 accord at all well with the distribution of antlingen/antuurten (corresponding to the beginning and end of Sievers’s section VI), which may indicate either that antlingen/antuurten is not a particularly significant criterion, or that the proposed sectionalisation is wrong.

5. Dialect and Dating as Factors

Baesecke, who believed the St Gallen manuscript to be the original, argued that one thing that showed that Walahfrid Strabo, who was from the Alemannic area, could have been the translator of 82,11-103,5 was precisely the fact that the North German antlingen does not occur in this part of the text (ignoring the incidence of antlingita in 87,3!!); for Walahfrid, according to Baesecke, the only German word for ‘to answer’ was the South German antwurten. But, as Wissmann also points out (1960: 267), this view is quite untenable because, as we have seen, antlengan is attested precisely in Alemannic, in the Benedictine Rule, where in fact it occurs more frequently than antwurten.

Erich Gutmacher, who demonstrated the links between the vocabulary of the Tatian and OE, OS, MLG or MDu. lexis, concluded that, whatever the translators might owe to church and literary texts, in the final analysis the vocabulary of Tatian was "ein problem der westgermanischen wortgeographie" (1914: 286). In general, that is doubtless right, but I consider that dialect geography is not the whole explanation for antlingen in Tatian. Rather the explanation may be a matter of the generations. Given that words of the antlingen family otherwise occur only in Alemannic texts of around 800 or earlier, it seems to me that the antlingen/antwurten dichotomy may indicate that antlingen was part of the vocabulary of an older translator. This does not mean that old monks used antlingen, young monks antwurten; it was more complex than that, for there are four passages in which both verbs occur cheek by jowl:

I find the first of these particularly interesting. Just as the first and third occurrences here are identical in the German (antlingota) while the second differs (antuurtita), so too we have a similar pattern in the Latin, with two occurrences of dixit contrasting with ait. Arguably, then, our translator was trying to imitate in German the stylistic variation of the Latin. Steinmeyer (1873) too speaks of the translator deliberately varying his renderings so that, for instance, scribes are sometimes called scrîbâri, sometimes buochâri, and priests now bisgofâ, now heithafte man. This seems to me a better explanation than imagining either some aberration on the part of a single translator or a rapid changeover of translators at this point. I think a desire for lexical variation is probably the answer in the other cases I have cited, too, though here the Latin formulations do not provide specific warrant for it. At the very least, it seems to me, it is difficult to conceive of passages (a) and (d) as each being the work of two translators. It seems much more plausible to consider them as each being the work of a single translator whose vocabulary showed some variation.

That does not mean that I believe that the whole text is the work of a single translator; far from it, I am quite convinced that the lengthy tracts where antuurten is the exclusive form, that is, from 80,3 to 85,3, from 87,4 perhaps to 103,4, 109,3 to 117,5 (representing substantial portions of Sievers-Steinmeyer sections III and IV which we had already noted were markedly out of character with the rest of the work) should be put down to another translator.

This is not the place to debate how many translators there were — I will go no further than ‘more than one’. Supposing there were two, it does not mean that there was necessarily a great age difference between them: it could simply have been the case that one used vocabulary that was bordering on becoming obsolescent. Baesecke speaks of the Latin having been translated into "ein dem Wortschatz nach recht altertümliches Deutsch". This of course is a matter of perception: what for one person is obsolescent is still current for another. Different generations of language coexist and overlap. After all, my mother, looking at the clock, regularly says ‘it is five-and-twenty to ten’, and I occasionally catch myself saying it too, whereas my own children find the expression unbelievably quaint and virtually unintelligible, though they too remember ‘four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’. Similarly at Fulda there must have been monks of different ages — not everyone died young in those days: Boniface himself, the founder, was over seventy when he died in 754, as was Hrabanus Maurus (whom Baesecke wished to identify with scribe z, but see Masser 1991: 102 and 126) when he died in 856. En passant, I observe that Moulton, in his study of the spelling habits of scribeg, likewise suggests that this man was a representative of an older generation who evidently tried to modernize his spelling: concluding that the suggestion that he was an Alemannic speaker must be rejected and that he was an East Franconian, more specifically Fuldese, Moulton declares, "He seems to belong, however, to an older brand of Fuldese than the other scribes, and there is evidence that he made a conscious effort to modernize his spellings" (1944: 334). Furthermore, we have to remember that "monasteries were not peopled by local monks" (Bostock 1976: 163; also Wrede 1892). Thus the age structure and geographical origins of the translators could well be the explanation of the lexical variety in the translation, while the patterning of the verbs for ‘to answer’ may also reflect a tentative, even timid attempt at stylistic variation.

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