Was Historiker ohne Sprachgeschichtler (wohl) kaum leisten können. Eine interdisziplinäre epigraphisch-sprachgeschichtliche Fallstudie
What the Historians Can (Hardly) Do without the Language-Historians. An Interdisciplinary Case Study

Summary/Abstract: Numerous gravestones written in German-language belonging to representatives of ancient and well-known noble families have been preserved in Lower Silesia. Many of them are in a state of disrepair, so today is the last opportunity to preserve the contents immortalised on them from destruction for the future generations. Many of them have been analysed by historians, but the results of these analyses are often linguistically, translationally and epigraphically so incorrect as to be difficult to accept. A historian who is not a historian of the language – such historians are certainly hard to come by – and who, after all, lacks basic competence in the study of Early Modern High German, the language in which most of the epitaph inscriptions from the early modern period were written, obviously has little chances of a correct linguistic interpretation and successful translation into Polish of a text written in early German language. One of the scientifically neglected epitaph plates is the plate of Adam von Kottwitz, which is located in Konotop (near Zielona Góra). The author of the contribution has set himself the task of examining all the content (verbal and non-verbal) that this record carries. The analysis begins by establishing the correct affiliation of the coat-of-arms symbols to the inscriptions of the genealogical argument of the deceased, which are mostly wrong situated. The author moves on soon to a detailed discussion of the various linguistic planes of the texts appearing on the epitaph. Thus, the author discusses the types of writing used in the record, the spelling of capital and lowercase letters, punctuation and abbreviations used in the text, as well as phraseology, but above all the purely linguistic, even strictly grammatical layer, i.e. the morphological forms and syntactic conditions which characterize the text of the research corpus. A great deal of space is also devoted to graphemes, the study of which is not solely an end in itself, but is intended to lead to shedding some light on the relationship between the graphemes of the written language and the phonemes of the spoken language potentially in use at the time of the monument’s creation.

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