JACOB WYMPFFLINGER’S “TUTSCHLAND.” 
E. K. J. H. VOSS. 
It is a strange fact, but nevertheless a fact, that the Modem 
High German literary language is not the natural development 
and the continuation of the language which the classic writers 
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries used, but that it de¬ 
veloped out of the language of the Middle East of Germany 
rather than out of that of the South. A glance at a Middle 
High German dictionary will easily prove this. 
We know a great deal about the older Germanic dialects, 
and also about the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during^ 
which German literature reached its first climax. But the 
transition period from Middle High German to Modem High 
German, that is the literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, has been neglected until recently by Germanists and 
is in a good many respects an unknown quantity to us still. 
This period alone, however, can throw the necessary light upon 
the history and development of our Modem High German liter¬ 
ary language. 
Since the days when this stupendous task became distinctly 
clear to those interested in the solution of this most wonderful 
and interesting phenomenon, a great deal of painstaking work 
has been done. But at times the hope of ever seing this task 
accomplished and the problem solved must have been a very 
faint one indeed. Recently, however, a sister institution of 
this academy, the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin* 
5l—iS. & A. 
