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Karl-Heinz Mottausch: Zur Geschichte der Substantivflexion im Südhessischen um Lorsch - Worms

The modern dialect of Lorsch and the surrounding area shows no trace of substantival inflection by endings ("post-determination"), whereas its earliest ancestor in the Old High German period, which is represented by the Lorscher Beichte of the eighth century and the Lorscher Bienensegen of the tenth century, has a fully fledged inflectional system of Old High German type, which is additionally characterized by the use of the article ("pre-de-termination"). The development to the modern system took place over a period of 300 years. Two interdependent phonetic changes were the main causes of this transformation, namely, (1) the weakening of vowels in unstressed syllables to /e/ in the tenth century, and (2) the almost complete loss of this /e/ in the period between the late tenth century and the middle of the thirteenth century. In particular, the multifunctional /-e/# (e.g. dat. sing. and nom., gen., acc. pl. a-stems; nom. sing. n-stems) gave way to a system governed by predetermination (articles and pronouns with or without prepositions). The "weak" declension and the isolated dat. pl. /-en/ were given up fairly quickly. The increasing tendency to predetermination also caused the loss of the "strong" s-genitive sing. At first, there were three competing options by which the synthetic genitive could be replaced (das Haus des Vater, das Haus von dem Vater, dem Vater sein Haus), two of them only surviving in complementary distribution. The thirteenth century is marked by the definitive collapse of the ancient postdeterminative substantival inflectional system.