Notker

NOTKER. - Called "Labeo" because of his thick lips. A monk of St. Gall, the third and most illustrious of this name, head of that famous monastic school, which he brought to its greatest splendor. Born around the middle of the 10th century, he died on June 26, 1022, of the plague. He was called "the most learned of the men of our memory." His work consists exclusively of translations of Latin classics, and especially of those that were used as school reading.

Among the many versions he composed, worthy of note are the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Marriage of Philology and Mercury of Martianus Capella, Boethius's commentary on Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, the Psalms, the biblical book most read at that time and indeed the one from which one learned to read, with the explanations of St. Augustine, and others of lesser account. Whether he also composed a translation of the Bucolics, of Cato's De moribus, and of Terence's Andria is nevertheless doubtful, but it is certain that some of his finished works were lost, among which it seems there was also a translation of Job. The method followed by N. in the vernacular rendering of classical texts constitutes an extraordinary innovation in the teaching of his time. Whereas, that is, previously, in the school of St. Gall only simple superscript or interlinear glosses had been used, N. was the first to compose complete versions, which are at the same time explanations and elucidations of the text, so that more than complete translations they may be called commented interpretations of the Latin models in the German language. The importance of such a work lies, naturally, more than in its hermeneutic value, in the philological field. A most skillful and patient scholar of the phonetic and morphological part of the German language, so that he could be called the first German grammarian after the great Rabanus Maurus, N. introduced some notable orthographic innovations, such as the accentuation of all stressed vowels - the circumflex on long ones, the acute on short ones - and the so-called law of initial consonants or "N.'s canon," according to which the initial voiceless stop (p, t, k) changes into a voiced one (b, d, g) after a word ending in a vowel or a liquid: an innovation, this last, which, while it shows a point of the Lautverschiebung explicable by physiological criteria, testifies in N. to a spirit of observation extraordinary for that time. For this predilection of his for the vernacular, which to himself seemed almost daring when he affirmed that he had attempted rem paene inusitatam, for the passionate search for its purity and its grammatical precision in an age in which so deep and general was the influence of Romanism on the spiritual life of Germany that even the themes of popular epic clothed themselves in Latin hexameters, one may say that he renews and continues the tendency of the Carolingian age, whence he rightly received from posterity the title of "Teutonicus." Unfortunately, in this work of his he remained solitary, nor did he have continuators even among his best disciples.

Bruno Vignola