The ''Paris Conversations'', , or ('Old German conversations') are an eleventh-century phrasebook for Romance-speakers (perhaps specifically Old French speakers) needing to communicate in spoken German. The text takes its name from the modern location of the sole surviving manuscript: according to Herbert Penzl, the text survives in the margins of a tenth-century manuscript of unrelated texts, Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale
A library is a collection of books, and possibly other materials and media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or digital (soft copies) materials, and may be a p ...
, MS. Lat. 7641 (with one leaf in
Vatican Library
The Vatican Apostolic Library (, ), more commonly known as the Vatican Library or informally as the Vat, is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City, and is the city-state's national library. It was formally established in 1475, alth ...
MS. 566). The language is a colloquial north-western dialect of German, providing valuable evidence for everyday spoken German.
[Herbert Penzl,]
"Gimer min ros": How German Was Taught in the Ninth and Eleventh Centuries
, ''The German Quarterly'', 57 (1984), 392-401, .
While in some ways a practical text useful to a cleric or aristocrat traveling in the German-speaking world, the text is also humorous, containing insults and envisaging scenarios like skipping church services to have sex.
[Catalin Taranu, ''Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker'' (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 138-39.]
Sample text
An example of the text, giving the German, then the Latin, and then a modern English translation, runs as follows:
(51.) () Give me my horse."(52.) Give me my shield."br/>
(53.) Give me my spear."br/>
(54.) Give me my sword."br/>
(55.) () Give me my gloves ()."br/>
(56.) () Give me my staff."br/>
(57.) () Give me my knife ()."br/>
(58.) () Give me (a) candle ()."ref name=":0" />
Editions
* Wilhelm Grimm, ''Kleinere Schriften'' (Berlin: Giitersloh, 1883), III, 473-513.
* E. Steinmeyer and E. Sievers,
Die althochdeutschen Glossen', V, 517-24 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1879 ff.).
* W. Braune-E.A. Ebbinghaus, ''Althochdeutsches Lesebuch'' (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), pp. 8-11.
BNF catalogue record
Studies
* W. Haubrichs,
Zur Herkunft der 'Altdeutschen (Pariser) Gespräche'" ''Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur'', 101.1 (1st Quarter, 1972), pp. 86-103.
* F. Jolles, "The Hazards of Travel in Medieval Germany," ''German Life and Letters'', 21 (1968), 309-19.
* R. Schützeichel, "Das westfränkische Problem," in ''Deutsche Wortforschung in europäischen Bezügen'' (Giessen: W. Schmitz, 1963), pp. 469-523
* Kershaw, Paul, "Laughter After Babel’s Fall: Misunderstanding and Miscommunication in the Ninth-century West," in ''Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages'', ed. by Guy Halsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 179–202.
See also
*
Kassel conversations Kassel conversations () is the conventional name of an early medieval text preserved in a manuscript from c. 810. It is held today in the university library of Kassel, Germany (Ms. 4° theol. 24). It contains several parts, among them an , an i ...
References
{{reflist
Old High German literature
Writers from the Carolingian Empire
Bibliothèque nationale de France collections
Bilingual books
11th-century books in Latin