The Treatment of Consonants in the "ambraser Heldenbuch"

148 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993.The orthography of the Early New High German period has occasionally been misinterpreted in the scholarship, and has consequently been described as being characterized by chaos, arbitrariness, and a proliferation of letters that has no phonological basis. This perceived chaos derives from attempts of the last century to reconcile the writing systems of vastly different dialects with a supposed standard language. Recent scholarship has shown that orthographies of the period can be shown to be systematic if individual dialects are treated separately.The Ambraser Heldenbuch is a parchment codex of the early 16th century. It contains 25 works of courtly, heroic and minor epic literature, of which 15 works are unique to the manuscript. The codex is also unusual in that the identity of the scribe who copied it is known. Hans Ried, sometime Revenue Collector in Bozen and member of a South Tyrolean 'Ministerialenfamilie', copied the manuscript between 1504 and 1516 at the behest of Emperor Maximilian.The bulk of the dissertation is an analysis of the consonantal orthography of the unica in the Ambraser Heldenbuch. Through this analysis and a comparison with the consonantal phonology of the modern Tyrolean dialect, I show that the peculiarities of Ried's orthography can be explained on the basis of the Tyrolean dialect.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD