From: naddy@mips.inka.de

On 2025-08-07, guido wugi  wrote:

> Do we know when and how* German and Dutch acquired their V2 inversion
> and verb-last-in-subclauses features?
> Medieval examples (often) show unaltered order.
> Scandinavian word order seems a mix of English and inverting order.
>
> * eg, standardising authority such as Bible translators?

I don't think German and Dutch share much Bible translation history.

Alas, I haven't yet read a history of German.  The closest I've
come is

  Damaris Nübling et al.
  Historische Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen:
  Eine Einführung in die Prinzipien des Sprachwandels

which explicitly does not cover the history of German, but merely
picks some examples from there to illustrate general principles of
language change.

What I can glimpse from the chapter on syntactic change:

PIE is thought to have had SOV order, so verb final position is
simply conservative.

Old High German word order was freer than today.  In main clauses,
the verb could be initial, final, or in second position.  This was
driven by pragmatics: when a new discourse referent is introduced,
the verb moves to initial position.  (A relic of this is the
verb-initial order frequently used in the opening lines of jokes:
"Kommt ein Pferd in die Kneipe ...")  If the referent is already
known, the verb moves into second position.

Already in the 11th century, V2 is dominant.  In dependent clauses,
three quarters are already verb-final; by the 14th century this is
the norm; by the 18th verb-final position has become fixed.

So in a slow process, over centuries, an originally optional word
order became fixed.  The _why_ is a lot harder to explain, and
adding more observations, e.g. a correlated increase in the number
of subordinating conjunctions, does little to separate cause from
effect.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de

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