Albertus (1573) and Ölinger (1574)

This article adapts Linn’s ‘stylistics of standardization’ concept, which Linn (1998) has used to compare Norwegian and Faroese grammarians, to look at grammaticization processes in the first two grammars of German (Albertus 1573, Ölinger 1574). While both are clearly indebted to traditional Latin grammar and humanist ideals, these two grammars differ interestingly in the picture of the language that emerges from their metalanguage and structural principles. In his reflection on the language, his structuring and naming of linguistic phenomena and his attitudes to variation, Ölinger is the practical pedagogue, who imposes systematicity and aims for a one-to-one form-function relationship. Albertus on the other hand, though he too envisages his grammar being used for learning German, has a more cultural patriotic motivation, celebrating the richness and variety of German, worthy to be ranked alongside Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Albertus and Ölinger thus come up with quite different versions of the (as yet arguably non-existent) High German language. Each grammar yields a different subset of possible forms, reminding us that grammar-writing is always a task of creative construction.