Timeline for Why is "bleiben" conjugated as "bleibet" in the Bach choral "Jesus bleibet meine Freude"?
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| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:45 | comment | added | tofro | @MichaelKay That's rather because German can express the futur with present tense - English cannot. | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:44 | comment | added | Michael Kay | "bleiben" = "to remain" is only an approximation, of course. Many senses of bleiben would be better expressed as "will always be" rather than "will remain". "Remain" in this sense is itself a little archaic. | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:36 | comment | added | rici | @tofro: I agree. It would be somewhere in between. But MHD is a data point in the phonological transition (and I couldn't find a reference for FNHD). If at some point in the past, the third person singular was "gibet" with a short "i" and at some later point, we find the word spelled "gibet", it's at least plausible that it was still pronounced with a short "i" when the verse was written. All speculation, of course. (Poetry is actually the best evidence we have of archaic pronunciation, because we can deduce from rhyme and rhythm. But it's imperfect: poetry is not the sound of the street.) | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:09 | comment | added | tofro | @rici I'm pretty sure Bach's lyrics are way closer to our modern language than to MHD (even if the text he re-used was about 60 years old when he composed the choral). [MHD: up until ~1300, frühneuhochdeutsch starting from 1350, lyrics from ~1660, now]. | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:07 | comment | added | rici | You can see this shift in Shakespeare, who used both the pronounced "ed" and the devocalised version for metrical purposes, sometimes in the same line. Example from Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3. "There is no world without Verona walls, / But purgatory, torture, hell itself. / Hence - banished is banish'd from the world, / And world's exile is death: then banished, / Is death mis-term'd: ..." | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 17:01 | comment | added | rici | How relevant that is I could not say. In the 17th century, when the poem was written, MHG had long since passed, and in any case the pronunciations conventionally assigned are completely speculative (and undoubtedly varied by dialect). Still, it's some sort of indication that "gibet" might have been pronounced with a short "i". To me, it's interesting that the same phonological process, elimination of "e" in conjugation suffixes, was also going on at about the same time in English, whose past tense was changing from "-ed" (still used in writing) to "-t" / "-d"... | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 16:56 | comment | added | rici | From what I've read since I posted this question, the conjugation of "gëben" in Middle High German was "ich gibe", "du gibest", "ër gibet", "wir gëben", "ir gëbet", "si gëbent". AIUI, MHG is conventionally written (now, not then) using explicit vowel-lengthening represented with a circumflex. So in "ër gibet", the "i" was short; the long "i" would have been "î". See Wikipedia or these class notes, which unfortunately have the wrong encoding declaration (should be cp1252). | |
| Dec 14, 2022 at 14:16 | history | edited | haxor789 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 14, 2022 at 14:02 | history | edited | haxor789 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 14, 2022 at 13:52 | history | answered | haxor789 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |