We can read the words of the past, but we can’t hear them. The ink on a thousand-year-old manuscript can preserve a story, a poem, or a law, but the voice of the person who wrote it is lost to the silence of history. What did Old High German, the language of Charlemagne’s era, actually sound like? Was it the harsh, guttural tongue of stereotypes, or something more melodic? This question, once confined to the educated guesses of historical linguists, is now being answered by an extraordinary fusion of medieval studies and modern technology: the “Audio-visual corpus of Old German” project, or AT-ST.
This groundbreaking initiative isn’t about finding ancient audio recordings; it’s about digitally recreating a lost soundscape. It’s a project that re-voices the past, allowing us to listen in on a world that has been silent for centuries.
The fundamental challenge is that writing is an imperfect map of speech. Alphabets are brilliant tools, but they are always an approximation. Think about English: the letters ‘ough’ can be pronounced in at least ten different ways (think through, though, rough, cough, bough). Now imagine trying to reconstruct the sound of English a thousand years from now with only written texts and no speakers.
Historical linguists face this exact problem. They can’t just interview a native speaker of Old High German (OHG), which was spoken roughly from 750 to 1050 AD. The language evolved, shifted, and branched into the dialects that would eventually become Modern German. The link between the written symbol (the grapheme) and the spoken sound (the phoneme) has to be painstakingly rebuilt from scratch.
If there are no recordings, where do researchers find the clues? The answer, brilliantly, lies in art. The AT-ST project turns to the most structured and sound-sensitive texts we have from the period: medieval poetry.
Poets are masters of sound, and their techniques leave behind a fossil record of pronunciation. The researchers act as phonological detectives, analyzing several key features:
By combining these internal clues with the comparative method—analyzing how OHG sounds evolved into Middle and Modern German, and how they relate to sister languages like Old English and Old Saxon—linguists can formulate a highly detailed hypothesis about the phonology of Old High German.
This is where the AT-ST project takes a leap into the 21st century. Having a theoretical model of OHG pronunciation is one thing; hearing it is another. This is achieved through advanced speech synthesis.
The process is multi-layered:
The result is startling. The AT-ST project has developed digital avatars—whimsically named Hilde and Brand after the characters in the Hildebrandslied—that can “speak” the reconstructed language, their virtual mouths moving in sync with the sounds being produced. It is the closest we have ever come to witnessing an Old High German conversation.
Listening to the AT-ST project’s recreations is a fascinating experience. Some aspects are familiar to speakers of Modern German, while others are strikingly different.
“Ik gihorta dat seggen, dat sih urhettun ænon muotin…”
(I heard it said, that champions met each other in single combat…)
– Opening line of the Hildebrandslied
When spoken by the AT-ST synthesis engine, several features stand out:
The overall effect is a language that sounds both archaic and powerfully alive. It connects the silent, static words on the page to the dynamic, physical act of human speech.
The AT-ST project is more than just a technological curiosity. It is a profound act of cultural and linguistic restoration. For scholars, hearing the poetry of Otfrid with its intended rhymes and rhythms offers new insights into his artistry. For students and the public, it transforms Old High German from an abstract academic subject into a tangible, audible piece of our shared heritage.
By blending the meticulous analysis of the humanities with the innovative power of computational linguistics, the AT-ST project has built a bridge across a thousand years of silence. It reminds us that language is, at its heart, a spoken and heard phenomenon, and it allows us, for the first time, to truly re-voice the past.
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