A starting point for working out how any given German word in this film would have been said. Wittenberg, 1539.
Read `pronunciation-library.md` in this directory for what's on the shelf and where the files are. Sources are cited inline below by short form.
**PRODUCTION DECISION — the film is subtitled in English, and the target is period
authenticity.**
Intelligibility to a modern German-speaking ear is not a constraint on this guide.
Every recommendation below that previously hedged toward comprehensibility has been
resolved in favor of the period form. In particular both regional features that were held
in reserve — unrounding (§3.9) and the Central German monophthongs (§3.10) — are now
on, and turning §3.10 on produces the etymological split described in §3.11, which is
the largest single authenticity gain available to us.
One thing this decision does not license: maximum dialect color everywhere regardless of
speaker and situation. See §3.12.
East Central German (ostmitteldeutsch, "omd."), Meissen/Wittenberg, c. 1539.
This is a decision, and it decides a great deal. Getting the region right matters more than getting any individual sound right, because most of the sound changes below happened in some regions and not others — and the popular picture of "old German" is Bavarian, which is the wrong region for us and wrong in ways an audience with any German will hear.
What the sources say about where Luther sat:
Two consequences worth holding onto. First, **Luther's language is transitional and internally variable by nature**, not by sloppiness: the Wittenberg prints show competing forms of different regional origin and different developmental stages side by side, and he kept older or regional forms like erbeit, gleuben, eraus well after 1531 (Hartweg & Wegera §4.3.2). Variation between two readings of the same word is authentic. Do not over-regularize. Second, there is Low German in the air in Wittenberg — the printers, apprentices, and servants in our scenes are plausibly Low German speakers or bilinguals, which is a directable distinction between Luther and the shop floor if we ever want one.
1. Get the Middle High German (MHG) form. The sound laws below are all stated as MHG → ENHG. Without the MHG ancestor you cannot run them. The MHG form is what the reference grammars index by. 2. Run the switch list in §3, in order. Each switch says whether it fires in East Central German. 3. Check what Luther actually printed. `corpusidx search "<spelling variants>"` reaches both `luther-wa` (112 files of the Weimarer Ausgabe) and the *Frühneuhochdeutsches Lesebuch*. Spelling is indirect evidence for sound, but it is the evidence we have most of, and a spelling Luther's shop actually used beats a form derived from first principles. 4. Check for direct testimony on anything unusual — the reading-masters described sounds explicitly. See §5. 5. Assign a confidence tier (§6) and, if the word is going into a draft or a recording sheet, write the tier down next to it.
Ordered roughly by how audible the difference is. The first four are what make this sound like Luther's German rather than generic stage-medieval German.
MHG diphthongs ie, uo, üe → long monophthongs [iː], [uː], [yː]. liebe guote brüeder → [ˈliːbə ˈguːtə ˈbryːdər]
Central German, running since about 1100, covering East Central German, most of Rhenish Franconian, the eastern half of East Franconian, and Bohemian. **Upper German does not do this** — Bavarian and Alemannic keep the diphthongs. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.2)
If an actor says [liəbə] or [guət], they are speaking Bavarian, not Luther's German.
This is the error most likely to happen and the easiest to hear.
MHG long î, û, iu → [ai], [au], [ɔi]. mîn niuwes hûs → mein neues Haus [main ˈnɔiəs haus]
By the 15th century the digraph spellings cover East Central German (East Saxon and parts of Thuringian). (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.1)
Regional caution. Most of Thuringian did not diphthongize except finally and in
hiatus — same footnote covers Alemannic, Lower Hessian and Ripuarian. Wittenberg is on the
East Saxon side, so the switch fires for us, but it is a genuine boundary, not a
universal.
East Central German having both 3.1 and 3.2 is precisely why this variety became the basis of the modern standard. It is the reason Luther's German sounds, to a modern ear, surprisingly close to modern German — much closer than a 1539 Bavarian or Swiss would.
Apocope of final -e took the whole of Upper German and most of Central German. "Only East Central German has largely preserved the -e." From the 16th century the -e spreads back outward from East Central German. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.3.3)
This is a rhythm and line-length decision, not just a sound one. gnade, trübe, herze keep their final syllable. It makes the speech a beat longer and more evenly weighted than apocopated Upper German would be.
In the central German area the voiceless fortes p, t, k were lenited to voiceless *b, d, g — the voicing relation is neutralized, not reversed. Only k* holds initially before a vowel. In East Central German, k is lenited to g even initially before a vowel, with spellings like volg, margt from the 14th century. For d/t, lenition arrives in East Central German in the 15th/16th century — i.e. it is in progress at our date. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.4.1)
Frenzel's own transcription practice for the period assumes b, d, g "were only minimally voiced, and then only in a favorable environment." (McGee ch. 16)
Practically: tell the actor not to produce modern German fully voiced [b d g]. Aim at
unaspirated, slack [b̥ d̥ ɡ̊]. Combined with 3.5 this is most of the "period" texture.
The apical r continued "probably in all dialects." The uvular r only became fashionable in the 17th–18th centuries, largely through the influence of the Parisian r. (McGee ch. 16)
Cheapest, most audible single win available. A modern German uvular [ʁ] is an anachronism of roughly two hundred years.
MHG short vowels in open stressed syllables lengthen. sagen [ˈzaːɡən], neben [ˈneːbən], wider [ˈviːdər]. Begins in Central German around 1200. Also in closed syllables in monosyllables, especially before liquid/nasal and before r + dental.
Does not fire before sch and ch, usually not before m + er/el/en, and usually not before t: Hammer, Himmel, Vetter, Ritter. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.3)
MHG long vowels shorten before multiple consonants and before [x]/[xt]: hât, jâmer, dâhte → hat, jammer, dachte. Reaches "its greatest spread" in East Central German. Derivation suffixes shorten regularly (-lîch → -lich). (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.4)
MHG i, u, ü lower to e, o, ö, especially before nasals but also before l, r + consonant. Attested in Thuringian and East Saxon from the 13th century, across all of Central German by the 14th/15th. sunne, sun, münech, künec → Sonne, Sohn, Mönch, König.
The catch: in the 16th century these forms were largely pushed back out of writing under Upper German influence. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.7)
So the spelling on a 1539 Wittenberg page may show sunne while the man reading it aloud
in Wittenberg said [ˈzɔnə]. This is a case where the print is actively misleading about
the speech, and a good example of why step 3 of the procedure is a check and not an
authority.
MHG rounded ö, œ, ü, iu unround and fall together with e, ê, i, î; öu → ei, üe → ie. By the 16th century there is evidence from the entire High German area except Ripuarian, East Franconian/Nuremberg, and High Alemannic — so East Central German is inside the area. (Hartweg & Wegera §7.2.5)
But relatively few unrounded lexemes reached the modern standard (*Kissen, spritzen, Pilz, Nerz, streifen, ereignen, Steiß, spreizen*), and the reading-masters were actively warning against unrounding — Kolroß (1530) tells writers not to swap the two. A warning is evidence people were doing it.
Still tier C — chosen, not established. Turning this on does not make the film *more
evidenced*; it makes it more strongly dialectal. What the sources give us is that East
Central German sat inside the unrounding area and that a reading-master was warning people
off it in 1530. That supports unrounding as **available and current in speech at our
date**, which under an authenticity-first brief is enough.
Applied: every ü → [i], every ö → [e], öu → [ei], üe → [ie]. So küssen → [ˈkisən],
könig → [ˈkeːniç], brüder → [ˈbriːdər].
Note the interaction with §3.1: brüeder first monophthongizes to [ˈbryːdər], then
unrounds to [ˈbriːdər]. Order matters — run the switch list top to bottom.
In Central German, MHG ei and ou were themselves monophthongized — a continuation of the monophthongization that began in Old High German: stein → stên, ougen → ôgen, houbet → hobt, boum → bôm, cleider → cleder. Hartweg & Wegera note these old Central German monophthongs "found only slight reflection in ENHG writing" (§7.2.7).
That last point is now an argument for rather than against. This is genuinely spoken East Central German that the printed page almost never shows — exactly the kind of thing an audience cannot get from reading a facsimile, and exactly what an authenticity-first brief is for. Tier C, like 3.9: chosen, well-motivated, not determined by the sources.
Turning 3.10 on has a consequence bigger than 3.10 itself.
Modern German [ai] comes from two different MHG sources, and modern German merges them. East Central German at our date does not. Hartweg & Wegera: in dialects that carried out the New High German diphthongization, "the diphthongs of different origin remain distinct just about everywhere; in part the MHG diphthongs are also further developed (monophthongized)" (§7.2.1).
So the two streams stay audibly apart:
| MHG source | Fate in East Central German | Example |
|---|---|---|
| long î | diphthongizes → [ai] | mîn → mein [main] |
| ei | monophthongizes → [eː] | stein → [ʃteːn] |
| long û | diphthongizes → [au] | hûs → Haus [haus] |
| ou | monophthongizes → [oː] | ougen → [ˈoːɡən], boum → [boːm] |
mein and Stein do not rhyme. Haus and Baum do not rhyme. Both pairs rhyme in modern German, and an audience that knows modern German will hear the difference immediately even through subtitles.
This supersedes Frenzel's `ei` rule. His "[ei] before 1500, [ai] after" (McGee ch. 16)
is an explicit simplification for singers working across all of ENHG — he says himself the
rules "do not guarantee total accuracy" but will keep a performance consistent. For a
region-specific East Central German target we can do better, and the etymology decides
each word rather than a single blanket value.
Cost: this is the one switch that requires per-word lookup. You cannot tell from the
spelling `ei` which stream a word is in — both are written `ei`. The MHG form is the only
way to know, which makes step 1 of §2 non-optional for every word containing `ei` or `au`.
Do not read the decision above as "maximum local color, every speaker, every line."
The sources cut the other way for Luther specifically. At his own table in Wittenberg he had interlocutors from Bavarian, Franconian and Hessian areas, and these gave him "the opportunity to adjust to modes of expression intelligible beyond the East Central German area" (Hartweg & Wegera §4.3, p. 62). And his printed language deliberately shed the most narrowly regional forms across three stages, with the third (after 1531/32) marked by "further abandonment of variants with narrow regional binding" (§4.3.2) — that is, by 1539 Luther is actively moving away from maximum local color in his public language.
A Luther who speaks the broadest possible Wittenberg vernacular in every scene is therefore not more authentic. He is authentic to a private register and inauthentic to a public one. The historically defensible shape is graded:
This is a gift for the film rather than a constraint: the refusal scene is the one where Luther's language should be at its most controlled, and that is also where the sources put it.
Wittenberg in 1539 is a two-language town, and the division runs by class and function, not by individual. Hartweg & Wegera (§4.3, p. 62): in Wittenberg Low German "was still spoken by broad layers of the population" but was in retreat, with East Central German advancing from the chancery and the university. Laboring and local is Low German; educated and official is High German.
Two supporting facts from the same source:
That second fact is the practical key — see the implementation note below.
| Speaker | Variety | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| PULLER, BEATER (pressmen) | Low German | The "men" — wage laborers, precisely Hartweg's broad layers |
| The boy with the ream; ambient shop talk ("Paper!" / "Coming up") | Low German | same |
| APPRENTICE | Low German | Local boy. Note the irony already in the script at line 43: he sets type in a language he does not speak, "lips moving, letters backward" |
| OLD PRINTER, YOUNG PRINTER | High German (East Central German) | Masters |
| LUFFT | High German, possibly Upper German-colored | See caution below |
| KATHARINA | High German (East Central German) | Born in the Leipzig area, convent at Nimbschen near Grimma — solidly Meissen territory on either candidate birthplace; minor nobility besides |
| LUTHER | High German (East Central German) | University professor. But see below |
Luther understands Low German. Hartweg & Wegera put his upbringing in Mansfeld and his schooling in Magdeburg, both Low German dominant in speech (§4.3, p. 62). He could follow it and probably answer in it. That is a card available to the film, not a costume note.
Caution on Lufft. The Amberg birth — which would make him an Upper German speaker and
an incomer to Wittenberg — rests on Maximilian Weigel's 1933 conjecture from a find in the
Amberg city archive. After Giesecke's genealogical work in 1943 it has been **neither
confirmed nor refuted.** Dramatically it is excellent: the printers' spokesman would speak
neither the local vernacular nor quite the chancery language. But the record does not
establish it, so any Upper German coloring for Lufft is `> DRAMATIC LICENSE:` and must be
marked as such. Flagged in the screenplay's Notes.
Line 91 — *"The men are gone home -- why should I, when he does not mind anything we say, whether to his face or not!"* — is the language boundary, spoken aloud.
Rewritten 10 Sep 2026. The speech used to run *"The men are gone home. We are among
ourselves. Can we not say whose doing this is?"*, and the seam rested on the whole of it.
The retort is Mabel's and it is the sharper line — it answers Lufft's *"Mind what you say
of him" instead of talking past it. The four words the seam actually needs, "The men
are gone home," were kept in the rewrite for exactly this reason*, so the boundary is
still spoken aloud and this section still stands. If a later pass drops them, this section
goes with them.
The day scene is the shop floor with presses running and the men working: Low German ambience. The evening scene is the same room, presses silent, masters only: High German. The Young Printer marks the moment the room changes language without knowing that is what he is describing.
It also does thematic work the script is already reaching for. The masters can speak frankly about Luther only once the men are gone — and nine lines later Lufft says *"tell me which of the men I am to send home first"* (line 100). The men whose livelihoods are being weighed do not speak the language the decision is made in. That is in the structure already; it does not have to be added.
In 1539 Low German is a different language, not an accent; the Lotther sample above shows how far. Every Low German line would need a translator and a coached actor, and with English subtitles the audience gains no meaning for the cost.
Recommended: give the shop floor High German with Low German sound values — the documented northern pattern from the second bullet above — and reserve actual Low German for a handful of ambient lines where meaning does not matter: the "Paper!" / "Coming up," the pressmen's thin beer and the dog in the yard. This buys the audible two-language town at a fraction of the production cost, and the one place it is fully authentic is the place nobody needs to follow.
Moved here from `the-offer-de.fountain`'s header on 10 Sep 2026, which was the only place it was written down.
| Who, to whom | Form |
|---|---|
| The masters, to one another | Ihr |
| The masters, to Luther (Herr Doctor) | Ihr |
| Luther, to the delegation | ihr |
| Luther and Katharina, to each other | du |
So no one in the film says du except the Luthers, and the single du in the script is a marriage. That is the whole point of the distribution: the printers' table is formal all the way through its own conspiracy, and the only unguarded speech in the film happens in the courtyard.
One consequence, and it bites on a shot. ENHG Ihr is both the plural and the polite singular, so "euer Weib" is the same word whether Lufft addresses the table or one man. When he turns to the Old Printer mid-speech in E-17, **nothing in the recording marks the turn** — and the Old Printer has no name to be addressed by. The turn therefore exists only in the picture, which is why that row's pan has to end on him. See `sheets/shots-evening.md`, E-17.
Frenzel's general rule: ENHG scribes used a system similar to MHG, and "on the whole the letters and groups of letters can be pronounced according to the rules for MHG." (McGee ch. 16) The following are the places that rule breaks.
| Written | Means | Note |
|---|---|---|
| `i`, `j`, `y` | /i/ | in = jn = yn |
| `v` word-initially | /u/ | vns = uns, vnter = unter |
| `v` before a vowel | [f] | vor, vater |
| `u` mid-word | /u/ | mut, darumb |
| `u` before a vowel | [f] | hieuor = hievor, zweiuel = zweifel |
| `w` | can be /u/ | erfrewt = erfreut |
| `th`, `rh`, `jh` | plain t, r, j | thun [tuːn], rath [raːt], jhar [jaːr], garthen [ˈɡartən] |
The decorative `h` after `t` appears from the late 15th century and "there is no linguistic evidence that this altered the pronunciation of the t in any way" — probably humanist Greek influence. Same for `rh`, `jh`, `vh`. Ignore it entirely. (McGee ch. 16)
Doubling (gaabe, saat); following `h` (fahren, befehlen); `ie` for [iː] after monophthongization made the `e` redundant and it was refunctionalized as a length mark (liegen [ˈliːɡən], krieg [kriːk]); and most commonly, a single rather than double following consonant (sagen, haben). (McGee ch. 16; Hartweg & Wegera §6.2)
The ENHG scribe writes superscript `e` over the vowel for umlaut, both long and short, where normalized MHG uses `æ, œ, iu` / `ä, ö, ü`. But superscript `v`, `o` and sometimes `e` mark the second element of a diphthong instead: gut = guot, och = ouch. Frenzel notes the ambiguity of superscript `e` and that fortunately the diphthong use is infrequent. (McGee ch. 16)
Penzl (§2.3.1–2.3.2) sets out the three evidence classes: spellings in texts, **the descriptions and recommendations of the grammarians and reading-masters, and the rhymes of contemporary poets**. The reading-masters are especially usable for phonology because their whole subject is orthography and its relation to sounding-out.
He also warns that their descriptions "naturally do not fully meet the demands of modern phonetics" — comparison to animal noises "seems primitive, but is often quite clear." Samples he gives:
For a word that turns on an unusual sound, the move is to go to the facsimiles in `books-pdf/` and look. Remember from `pronunciation-library.md` that the Fraktur facsimiles have unusable OCR — Ickelsamer, Frangk and the Vier seltene Schriften volume must be read as page images. Clajus OCR'd well and is greppable.
Write the tier next to any pronunciation that goes into a sheet.
The IPA models in McGee are all from the wrong dialect. Frenzel's four transcribed sample texts are the Lochamer Liederbuch (Bavaria, 1452–60), Oswald von Wolkenstein (South Tyrolean, c. 1400), Hans Sachs (Nuremberg, c. 1515), and the Ambraser Liederbuch (printed Frankfurt 1582). Not one is East Central German, and the two closest in date are Nuremberg and Frankfurt. They remain useful as models of how to transcribe and of general ENHG texture, but every vowel in them has to be re-filtered through §3 before it means anything for Wittenberg. In particular the Lochamer transcription keeps Bavarian diphthongs and Bavarian initial p- for b-, both of which are wrong for us.
Frenzel's own framing is that this is a range, not an answer. He states plainly that for 1350–1600 the guidelines "are more general than for MHG and offer possibilities and ranges from which the singer can choose," because there was no political or cultural centre to provide a standard and the sound changes were moving at different speeds in different dialects.
The stressed-vowel reference is missing from our shelf. Per `pronunciation-library.md`, we have Moser/Stopp on unstressed syllables only. For a hard question about a stressed vowel, Hartweg & Wegera §7.2 and Ebert et al. are what we have; Virgil Moser's 1929 Lautlehre would have to come from a library.
There is no consensus reconstruction and no recording. Nothing here has the authority that Original Pronunciation Shakespeare carries. The realistic target is a defensible, internally consistent flavor.
If a subsequent agent needs a default rather than a procedure, use this. Run it top to bottom — the order matters (see §3.9).
1. Monophthongize ie, uo, üe → [iː uː yː]. Never Bavarian diphthongs. 2. Diphthongize î, û, iu → [ai au ɔi]. 3. Monophthongize MHG ei → [eː] and ou → [oː]. With 2, this keeps the two streams apart: mein [main] but stein [ʃteːn]; Haus [haus] but baum [boːm]. Requires the MHG form per word — §3.11. 4. Unround: ü → [i], ö → [e], öu → [ei], üe → [ie]. Applies after 1. 5. Keep final -e. 6. Slack, unaspirated, barely-voiced [b̥ d̥ ɡ̊]; final devoicing. 7. Apical trilled/tapped r. 8. [ʃ] before consonants, including sp- and st-; [ʃ] after r. 9. [ç] after front vowels, [x] after back. 10. Silent medial h; ignore decorative th/rh/jh. 11. Apical [s̺], not a firm modern [z]. 12. `w` = bilabial [β]. 13. Medial and final g as a fricative [ɣ] — Ickelsamer's hissing geese, §5.
Lengths follow §3.6 and §3.7. Grade the whole thing by register per §3.12: this baseline is the broad setting, right for the print shop. Pull items 3, 4 and 13 back toward the supra-regional forms for Luther in the refusal scene.
*Resolved by the subtitling decision: both flavor dials (§3.9, §3.10) are on, and `w` is [β]. Remaining:*
1. Low German — settled in principle (§3.13): two-language town, shop floor against masters, implemented as High German with Low German sound values plus a few genuinely Low German ambient lines. Still open: how many ambient lines, and **whether Lufft takes the Upper German coloring** (conjectural origin — §3.13). Both change `the-offer-de.fountain`, casting and coaching, so decide before the German script is revised. 2. How far to grade the register (§3.12). The three-step scheme above is a proposal, not a finding. Someone has to decide how audible the gap between the shop floor and Luther should be. 3. Whether the German script's orthography should follow. Now that no one is reading the German for sense, `the-offer-de.fountain` could use period spelling — the `vns`/`jn`/`thun` conventions of §4 — which would help any actor or TTS voice reach the period forms instead of fighting modern orthography. Cosmetic for the audience, useful for production. 4. Per-word `ei`/`au` lookup is now on the critical path (§3.11). Every such word in the script needs its MHG etymology checked. That is mechanical but it is not free, and it should be budgeted before recording rather than discovered during it.