The High German Sound Shift in the "Altdeutschen (Pariser) Gesprachen"

A manuscript known variously as the Altdeutschen Gesprachen (Old German Conversations) & the Pariser Gesprachen (Paris Conversations) is held to provide extremely valuable evidence of the spoken form of Old High German (OH) during the 10th century, as it consists of a glossary with marginalia containing sentences & syntagmatic fragments & was intended as a conversational travel guide to German-speaking regions. The writer is argued to have had orthographic training & a good knowledge of a western variety of German; analysis of orthographic variants in the marginalia reveals a stage of OHG at which original voiceless stops are still affricates in all environments, as fricatization has not yet taken place. J. Hitchcock