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Dana Janetta Dogaru: Zur Sprachqualität der frühneuhochdeutschen Predigten des siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Pfarrers Damasus Dürr

The Transylvanian German pastor Damasus Dürr (ca. 1535–1585) produced a collection of sermons of no less than 1039 pages and in doing so has left us a text corpus which provides valuable data about the development of the New High German written standard in Transylvania in the sixteenth century. Subject to influences from the Transylvanian “Saxon” dialect on the one hand and to those of the South German and East Central German written varieties on the other, the language of Dürr’s oeuvre is characterized by East Central German features and represents an earlier phase in the development of a unified standard German comparable with similar stages in the evolution of New High German elsewhere in the central and southern regions of the German linguistic area. Transylvania thus belongs to those regions in which the development of the modern High German standard written language was relatively early.