UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Resonances in Middle High German: New Methodologies in Prosody Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13c6h2z2 Author Hench, Christopher Leo Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Resonances in Middle High German: New Methodologies in Prosody by Christopher Leo Hench A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German and in Medieval Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Niklaus Largier, Chair Professor David Bamman Professor Frank Bezner Professor Anton Kaes Fall 2017 Resonances in Middle High German: New Methodologies in Prosody Copyright 2017 by Christopher Leo Hench 1 Abstract Resonances in Middle High German: New Methodologies in Prosody by Christopher Leo Hench Doctor of Philosophy in German and in Medieval Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Niklaus Largier, Chair For years, scholars of medieval German have grappled with how to analyze formal charac- teristics of the lyric and epic poetry while taking into consideration performance, musicality, mouvance, linguistic variation, and aggressive editing practices. The scholarship has jus- tifiably resorted to restricted explorations of specific texts or poets, or heavily criticized region-specific descriptions with several caveats. The many challenges this multifaceted po- etry presents has also obscured one of its most central features—–the medieval voice. With the little evidence we have often being ambiguous or contradictory, how are we to understand the role of the medieval voice in the German corpus as a whole? This project seeks to shed light on this forgotten aspect by taking advantage of computational methods to demonstrate relative formal and thematic relationships based on sound and voice. In doing so, it presents several new prosodic analytical methods. The first chapter of this project underlines the importance of sound and voice to medieval performance and composition. It additionally justifies the syllable as the foundation ofthe novel formal methods presented in the following chapters. Chapter two presents a new syllabification algorithm that combines two linguistic principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Legality Principle. This algorithm is then customized and computationally implemented to perform accurately on medieval German across dialects and editing practices. Chapter three employs this syllabification algorithm to characterize different phonological soundscapes in reference to theme and voice using a modest corpus of only medieval German lyric poetry. While chapter three intends to quantify the vocal affect of a soundscape, chapter four aims to account for the sequencing of these soundscapes within the larger text and corpus. Chapter three therefore lays the foundation for a structural model of medieval German form. Finally, chapter five reduces the corpus once again to a very small subsetof medieval German Vierheber (epic poetry with four stresses per line). It presents a supervised machine learning model to predict scansion for these texts according to the theory proposed 2 by Andreas Heusler, and draws conclusions from how different poets took advantage of the freedom this structure allowed. In each chapter, I present the aggregate statistics to confirm and supplement our knowl- edge of the medieval German corpus as a whole. Yet more importantly, I return to individ- ual texts in order to demonstrate how these newly discovered formal soundscapes manifest and function within a smaller narrative. This combination of “distant reading” and “close reading” supports my overarching argument that medieval German form and content were demonstrably and quantifiably highly intertwined. In many cases markedly different formal, phonologically-influenced structures were implemented to trigger connections to related texts and formats. This project thus creates a new understanding of intertextual relations in me- dieval German literature. i For my family ii Contents Contents ii List of Figures iv List of Tables vi 1 Voice and Rhythm in the Middle Ages 1 1.1 The Medieval Voice ................................ 2 1.2 Rhythm and Memory ............................... 9 1.3 Music and Rhythmic Poetry in the Middle Ages . 14 1.4 Justifying the Syllable .............................. 23 2 Syllabification and Noisy Data 27 2.1 Onset Maximization and Legality ........................ 28 2.2 Sonority Sequencing Principle .......................... 29 2.3 Syllabification of Middle High German ..................... 30 2.4 Linguistic Normalization ............................. 36 2.5 MHG Corpus for Subsequent Analysis ..................... 42 3 Soundscapes 45 3.1 Close Reading Soundscapes ........................... 46 3.2 Formal Debates .................................. 53 3.3 Distant Reading Soundscapes .......................... 59 4 A MHG Text Morphology 76 4.1 Soundscape Patterning within MHG Verse ................... 78 4.2 Form and Content ................................ 106 5 Meter and Emphasis 117 5.1 From Quantity to Quality ............................ 119 5.2 The Middle High German Vierheber . 123 5.3 Previous Computational Approaches to Meter . 126 5.4 Data ........................................ 129 iii 5.5 Workflow ..................................... 130 5.6 Models and Features ............................... 133 5.7 Results ....................................... 134 5.8 Errors and Challenges .............................. 137 5.9 Characterizing the Middle High German Vierheber . 145 5.10 Comparison to sound patterning method . 158 5.11 MHG Scansion GUI Software for General Use . 160 6 Conclusion and Further Work 162 6.1 Sensory Perception ................................ 162 6.2 Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies . 163 6.3 Interdisciplinary Work .............................. 164 6.4 Future Work .................................... 164 Bibliography 166 A LegaliPy 178 B SonoriPy 183 C SyllabiPy MHG 187 D Lyric Texts in Chapter 3 196 E Verse Texts in Chapter 4 200 iv List of Figures 2.1 Flow chart for MHG syllabification. ......................... 31 3.1 Distribution of soundscapes in the MHDBDB lyric corpus . 64 3.2 Lemmatized pronouns by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions . 65 3.3 Lemmatized articles by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions . 66 3.4 Lemmatized pronouns by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, without NEI, FR3, MRA, MVL, WVV ............................... 68 3.5 Lemmatized articles by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, without NEI, FR3, MRA, MVL, WVV .................................. 68 3.6 Lemmatized pronouns by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, one held out . 69 3.7 Lemmatized articles by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, one held out . 69 3.8 Lemmatized pronouns by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, for Walther von der Vogelweide .................................... 70 3.9 Lemmatized articles by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions, for Walther von der Vogelweide .................................... 70 3.10 Lemmatized Leitworte by soundscape grouping, stanza divisions . 71 4.1 Textual network based on formal features ..................... 88 4.2 Connections for Das Annolied ............................ 89 4.3 Connections for Der von Kürenberg ......................... 91 4.4 Connections for Dietmar von Eist .......................... 93 4.5 Connections for Reinmar der Alte .......................... 94 4.6 Connections for Virginal ............................... 95 4.7 Connections for Das Eckenlied ............................ 95 4.8 Connections for Frauenlob’s Leich .......................... 97 4.9 Connections for Walther von der Vogelweide .................... 98 4.10 Connections for Konrad’s Engelhard ......................... 99 4.11 Connections for Ulrich von Eschenbach’s Alexander . 100 4.12 Connections for Thomasîn von Ziclaere’s Der Welsche Gast . 102 4.13 Connections for Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst . 103 4.14 Connections for Mönch von Salzburg . 104 4.15 Connections for Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Der Ring . 105 v 5.1 Flow chart for MHG scansion. ............................ 131 5.2 Tagging accuracy with added input. 135 5.3 Automatische Mittelhochdeutsche Skandierung software . 161 5.4 Automatische Mittelhochdeutsche Skandierung output . 161 vi List of Tables 2.1 Comparison of diplomatic transcriptions and normalized editions in manuscript C, weighted by syllable count in stanza ....................... 41 3.1 Summary statistics for soundscape stanza analysis . 60 3.2 Variance in texts’ soundscapes ............................ 61 3.3 Counts of stanzas per soundscape bucket ...................... 63 3.4 Summary statistics for soundscape stanza analysis, Walther von der Vogelweide 67 4.1 Word frequency for the MHG Parzival ....................... 82 4.2 Verse sequence frequency ............................... 87 4.3 Top five tfidf values for Das Annolied ........................ 90 4.4 Top five tfidf values for Der von Kürenberg .................... 91 4.5 Top five tfidf values for Das Nibelungenlied (B/C, Bartsch/deBoor) . 92 4.6 Five most similar texts to Nibelungenlied B/C, Bartsch/deBoor . 92 4.7 Top five tfidf values for Dietmar von Eist ...................... 93 4.8 Top five tfidf values for Reinmar der Alte ..................... 94 4.9 Top five tfidf