CLAIM / COUNTERCLAIM / LIMITRECORD 603
DISPUTE
RECORD.
One scholarly question. Every attached source. The present editorial state, without pretending the last word has been written.
openestablished
Does the end of the ninth-century record prove the verb died in 900?
No. The dictionary bounds surviving evidence; it does not identify one extinction event, last speaker, or exact loss date.
WORD UNDER REVIEWDISPUTE 603
fīēn
not directly recoverable · Old High German weak verb
Old High German fīēn—printed fîên in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch—was a weak verb meaning to hate, not love, be hostile to, detest, or reject. The official dictionary says it is attested only in Alemannic manuscripts of the eighth and ninth centuries, then inventories an infinitive fien, present participle fiendi, second-person singular preterite fietos, and accusative plural masculine past participle fieta. Three rule-text records concern hating discipline, one’s own will, or no person; gloss records align the participial forms with Latin exosus or exosos; and an Esther gloss aligns fien with detestari. These are source-reported edition and dictionary records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and the broad manuscript horizon does not identify one exact first token. A separate twelfth-century article printed fien [sic] with the gloss ubere is explicitly left uninterpreted by the dictionary and is not merged into this hate verb. Beside the verb, Old High German had the already lexicalized enemy noun fīant, whose old participial character could still shine through in fixed phrases. The graph therefore shows a living daughter verb beside a grammatical fossil without pretending that either attested form is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word itself. No historical sound recording exists and the dossier does not display a fabricated phonetic certainty.
01DIRECT CLAIM EVIDENCE
1 SOURCES WITH A STANCE
A citation is not a vote. Each record says whether the work supports, challenges, contradicts, or contextualizes the position—and identifies the exact locus used.
SOURCE 01supportshistorical dictionary
Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch — fîên
Bounds evidence without proving a loss event in 900.
Attested only in eighth- and ninth-century Alemannic manuscripts- AUTHOR / EDITOR
- Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch editorial team
- YEAR
- Not recorded
- PUBLISHER
- Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig
02 / EDITORIAL STATE
THE QUESTION REMAINS OPEN.
- CONFIDENCE
- established
- STATUS
- open
- LEGACY SOURCE SUMMARY
- The official source reports where and when the verb is attested, not when every spoken continuation ceased.
WHY NO RESOLUTIONThe reviewed evidence does not yet warrant collapsing the competing or incomplete analyses into one secure answer.