Table Of ContentTHE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
Some Considerations on the Origins of
Wymysorys
A thesis submitted to the Department of Linguistics
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
Carlo Ritchie
November, 2012
Preface
Wymysorys (Wymysiöerys), the smallest Germanic language, is a critically
endangered language of Southern Poland spoken by less than 45 inhabitants of the
town of Wilamowice. The classification of Wymysorys is a contentious issue and one
that has been the focus of much of the scholarly work on the language over the past
century. Historically Wymysorys has been grouped alongside languages such as
Modern German as an Irminonic Language; this classification however, has been
made largely without consideration of the phonological and morphological
character of the language. The classification of Wymysorys as an Irminonic language
is at odds with folk-history of the last Wilamowiceans, who variously claim to be
descendant of Frisian, Flemish or English settlers, a claim that has yet to be
investigated on the basis of the genetic origins of the phonological and
morphological innovations of Wymysorys. This will be the focus of this paper.
Chapter 1 examines the current classification of Wymysorys as well as a brief
linguistic and ethnological history of the language. Chapter 2 introduces current
theories on the disposition of West Germanic, placing Wymysorys within this
broader context. Chapters 3 and 4 comprise the bulk of this paper, focusing on the
phonological and morphological innovations of Wymysorys. Chapter 5 summarises
this paper’s conclusions.
1
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks go firstly the people of Wilamowice for their hospitality and
generosity which seem to know no bounds. Especially I would like to thank the
families Sojka and Król for welcoming a stranger into their lives. Dzi
ękuję bardzo
moja rodzina polska. To my own family I am especially grateful for their
encouragement, love and support despite my absentia from your lives for the better
part of the year.
My thanks also are owed to my proof reader Mathew Wainscot for so kindly
offering his time and for reading a linguistics text that I imagine made little or no
sense at times and to Dr Monika Bednarek my thanks for her help with my German
translations. I gladly accept responsibility for the remaining errors.
Thanks are also due to Dr Toni Borowski, Michaela Bester and Veronica
Wagner for accommodating my constant honours woes and angst over the past
semester. My thanks also to Dr James Martin, Olivia, James and Glenn, i
t’s been
emotional.
I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr Tomasz Wicherkiewicz, Dr Michael
Hornsby and Dr Rinaldo Neels who in addition to their tireless support have
generously put-up with constantly reading my emails over the past year.
I am especially thankful to my supervisors. My thanks to Prof. William Foley
and Dr Jason Johnston it has been an absolute pleasure and indeed a privilege. I
would especially like to thank Jason for his persistent calm and assistance, without
which I could not have managed. Thank you.
Finally I wish to thank three Wilamowiceans, Anna Fox, Helena Biba and
Tymoteusz Król. To whom I dedicate this work.
B åjda, ong. Hylf Göt.
ej’h inda ym gedanka men fr Łowst’dy ł
2
Oh, dü o dy, iwy proh
ł ł ś
Wjyr kuza dejh inda nöh
Dü byst mej wat wi gie d
ł
Wjyr müsa oü andry yjn
ł
Oder dejh we a wer inda hjyn
ł
Bocufs end fur we t
ł
- Florian Bieisk
3
Contents
List of Figures 6
List of Recordings 6
1. Introduction 7
1.1. Current Classification 9
1.2. An Ethnolinguistic History of Wilamowice 9
1.3. Written works in Wymysorys 13
1.4. A Note on Tymoteusz Król and Current Preservation Efforts 15
2. The Germanic Languages 16
2.1. Wymysorys, a West Germanic Language 19
2.2. The West Germanic Languages 20
2.2.1. The Ingvaeonic Language (North Sea Coast Germanic) 20
2.2.1.1. Ingvaeonic Nasal Deletion 24
2.2.2. The Irminonic Languages (Alpine Germanic) 25
2.2.2.1. The High German Sound Shift 29
2.2.3. The Istvaeonic Languages (Franconian) 29
3. Phonology 33
3.0. The Sounds of Wymysorys 33
3.0.1. Palatalisation of Velar Plosives 37
3.0.2. Distribution of /l/ and /w/ 37
3.1. The High German Sound Shift 40
3.1.1. First Phase 45
3.1.2. Second Phase 51
3.1.3. Third Phase 56
3.1.4. Fourth Phase 59
3.2. New High German Diphthongisation 59
4
3.3. New High German Monophthongisation 60
3.4. The gen/gan and sten/stan Alternation 61
3.5. / / Retention 61
β
3.6. Loss of Final n 62
–
3.7. Findings 64
4. Morphology 69
4.1. Case 69
4.2. Gender 71
4.3. Pronouns 72
4.3.1. Personal Pronouns 72
4.3.2. Weak Forms 74
4.3.3. The 3rd Person Masculine Singular 76
4.4. Diminutives 80
4.5. Cardinal Numbers 81
4.6. Verbs 81
4.6.1. Infinitive 82
4.7 A Note on Word Order 82
4.8 Findings 83
5. Closing Remarks 86
Appendix 88
References 89
5
List of Figures
1.1. Location Of Wymysorys 10
2.1. The distribution of Germanic languages in Europe 16
2.2. The Germanic Family Tree 18
2.3. Chronology of Ingvaeonic 23
2.4. Low, Central and High German 26
2.5. Chronology of Irminonic 28
2.6. Chronology of Istvaeonic 32
3.1. Chronological and geographical progress of the High German Sound Shift 41
3.2. Major sound shifts in relation to dialect groups 44
3.3. The Uerdingen Line 45
3.4. The Speyer Line 54
3.5. East Central German 65
4.1. The Personal Pronouns of Wymysorys 72
4.2. Distribution of h- and er 3SM nominative 77
List of Recordings
Accessed from the archives of Adam Mickiewicz University
(Poznań, Poland):
WYM 120131_001
WYM 120210_002
6
1. Introduction
Wymysorys, the traditional language of the Southern Polish town of
Wilamowice, is the smallest language in the West Germanic family. The origin of
Wymysorys remains contentious; central to this being the conflict between the
conclusions of the majority of scholar works for a German origin of the language
and the self-identification of ethnic Wilamowiceans as being distinctly non-German.
This position on the non-German origin of Wymysorys is central to local folk-
etymology and is central to the small number of literary works published in the
language; the possibility of a non-German origin of Wymysorys, however, has
historically been dismissed and it not until recent years that any historical or
linguistic weight was attached to this non-German self-identification.
Wymysorys has traditionally been classified as a member of the Irminonic
family, the grouping of West Germanic Languages that includes Standard German,
Yiddish and Silesian German. The West Germanic family of languages in addition to
Irminonic is further divided into the Istvaeonic which includes Dutch, Flemish and
Afrikaans, and Ingvaeonic languages, to which English, Scots, Low German and
Frisian belong. The classification and make-up of the varieties of West Germanic is
discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2. Differing local accounts for the geographic
origin of Wymysorys (Wicherkiewicz 2003; 17) place the language variously in the
Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic language families. The Ingvaeonic family for example, or
Nielsen 1989 and others), is defined
‘North Sea (Coast) Germanic’ (Harbert 2007,
not only by those morphological and phonological innovations unique to Frisian,
Low German, Scots and English but also by the geographical area which these
languages inhabit. In (very) broad terms the historical Ingvaeonic Sprachraum could
be considered to be an area consisting of parts of modern Schleswig-Holstein,
Friesland and the British isles; folk history that suggests an origin from this region
consequently suggests a possible relationship between Wymysorys and the
Ingvaeonic Languages. Theories on the origins of Wymysorys found in folk-histories
7
are, however, not ubiquitous and variously suggest the point of origin as the British
Isles, Flanders and Friesland. Of these, the possibility of a Flemish origin has been
the subject of a number of recent studies (Neels forthcoming, Ryckeboer 1984,
Morciniec 1984) and is the most widely expressed conviction of the Wilamowiceans
themselves (Wicherkiewicz 2003; 15).
The classification of individual West Germanic languages as Istvaeonic,
Irminonic or Ingvaeonic is based on
shared innovation, “changes which have
appeared in some members of the family but not in others” (Trask 1996; 182). The
notion of genetic separateness in the West Germanic family is related to the gradual
dissemination of phonological and morphological innovations across the West
Germanic family from the point of departure from Indo-European up until the
present day, the result being the 38 different languages that now comprise the
Germanic Family (Harbert 2007; 7-8). The significance of morphology and
phonology in the classification of any Germanic language cannot be understated.
up the Germanic dialects should
Nielsen (1989) concludes that “any attempt to gro
take as its point of departure the fields of phonology and morphology” (Nielsen
1989; 147). This conclusion is made partly on the basis of the wealth of material
available to linguists on the geographical and historical spread of phonological and
1 (Nielsen 1989;
morphological features dating from “the days of Rask and Grimm”
146) and also on the relative stability of phonology and morphology when
compared to lexis (Arndt 1959; 181). Despite the significance of shared
phonological and morphological innovations to language classification, the origins
of Wymysorys have not been considered with respect to phonology or morphology.
The notion that Wymysorys is an Irminonic language is made on the basis of lexical
1 Rasmus (Christian) Rask (1787 1832), a Danish philologist whose work is considered to be the
–
first to posit a connection between the Western and Nothern Germanic languages. Rask is generally
credited with discovering the consonant transmutation between Greek, Sanskrit and Germanic, the
1863) in 1822.
basis of “Grimm’s Law” posited by Jacob Ludwig Grimm (1785 –
8
comparison or extralingustic evidence; tracing the origins of the phonological and
morphological innovations of Wymysorys has not yet been undertaken. This and
consequently the validity of the Irminonic classification of Wymysorys is the focus
of this paper.
1.1 Current Classification
Wymysorys is grouped with Standard (High) German, Upper Saxon and Upper
Silesian, to be classified by Lewis (2009) as East Central German, the branch of
Central German that originating from Irminonic (Harbert 2009; 8, Howe 1993; 51)2.
009) classification is made on the basis of peer-reviewed literature and so
Lewis’ (2
the classification as an Irminonic language is therefore understandable given the
large number of sources that claim a German origin for Wymysorys (Lasatowicz
1994, Mojmir 1936, Kleczkowski 1920 and others), for a complete history of the
classification of Wymysorys see Wicherkiewicz (2003; 5-14). The historical
proximity of Wilamowice with Upper Silesia has also contributed to this view.
1.2 An ethnolinguistic history of Wilamowice
Wicherkiewicz (2003) provides a comprehensive account of the history of both
Wilamowice and the surrounding region, in addition sketching the changing
ethnolinguistic profile of the area over the past 700 years. As the purpose of this
paper is an evaluation of the origins of Wymysorys on the basis of morphological
and phonological evidence, I will provide a brief summary of Wicherkiewicz’s
(2003) work on the ethnolinguistc history of Wilamowice and its surrounds. I aim to
demonstrate in this summary that there is no more evidence for why Wymysorys
2 It is important to note here that Harbert (2007) makes no mention of Wymysorys in his discussion
of the Irminonic family or in his work in general, the language having only been classified by
Ethnologue in 2009 (Lewis 2009). I have placed Wymysorys in the same group as Harbert (2007) has
placed High German and Yiddish (Harbert 2007: 8).
9
