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Günter Bellmann: Standardisierung und Umstandarisierung: der siebente / der siebte

In the course of the nineteenth century, lexicographers began to record the coexistence in Standard German of two variants of the ordinal number derived from the cardinal number sieben, namely, siebente and siebte. In 1865, D. Sanders introduced the lemma sieb(en)te for the ordinal number, and was later followed somewhat hesitantly by K. Duden. Nowadays, the uncontracted form siebent-, which is old-established as a written form and was once general in official usage, occurs in the written and spoken language largely in eastern Germany and in Austria, while the contracted form siebt- is by origin one of a number of dialect variants found in the spoken language. It attained its standard status as it was gradually taken into the written language in the same way as several other features and elements of the spoken language were. This happens increasingly and conclusively in the second half of the twentieth century in the territory of the old Federal Republic (West Germany), not least as a result of the influence of (sport) reporters and, above all, of television presenters.

It is possible and indeed sensible to supplement the simple opposition of siebent- vs. siebt- in Standard German (Fig. 1) by reference to High and Low German dialect forms, and to present the resulting enlarged spectrum of variants as a comprehensive model viewed in the context of formal reduction (Fig. 3). At the same time, approaching the question from the context of reduction provides access to the distribution map of the attested dialect forms (Fig. 2), firstly, with regard to the structural context and, secondly, with regard to the presumable origin of the variants. It is recognized that the initial trigger for this reduction lies in the formation of a uniform syllable structure in the numeral sequence from erst- to zwölft- in the spoken language. The result is partly (in the east and the southeast) an assimilative reduction (siemt-, etc.), which is only realized in the spoken language, and partly a strictly non-assimilative development to segmental reduction (High German sibet-, sibt-, siebt-, Low German sewet-, seft-, etc.). In the case of siebt-, we can reckon with an autochthonous origin, but also with diffusion or the effects of contamination. The apparently haphazard distribution of the segmental variants indicated on the map (Fig. 2) can be explained as resulting from the differing degrees of isolation and stabilization reached by the individual phases of reduction after the actual mechanism of reduction, which had previously been variable and continuous, had become largely static. Further important aspects of the development belonging to more recent times are the tidying up and general levelling out of the diversity of variants in connection with the triumph of the now dominant and more highly regarded variant siebt-, as well as the prestige of this "West German" variant which is now spreading into the new Bundesländer in the territory of the former GDR. We see then that the most recent diffusion pattern, that of siebt-, supersedes an earlier one, that of siebent-. Questions of semantics and of linguistic contact are also examined.