The Early New High German bridge - Reflections on the linguistic typological periodization of the history of the German language

The periodisation of the history of the German language has proved to be highly problematic because of the variety and duration of intralingual developments. This article re-examines the chronological periods of the morphological and syntactic development of German on the basis of some considerations from the theory of language change and language typology. One result is that Early New High German is shown to be an independent period in the history of the German language, forming a bridge between medieval and modern German.