Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/506

502 t disappears finally in du muots: guots 605. Comp. also mag(et) 241.

Furthermore the ending in -en of the first pers. sing, pres., as ich haben 1281, erkennen 244, enkennen 1387, meinen 1048, 1057, sagen 1462, sehn 891, getrinken 1128; metathesis of r in verbreg 178, 180 and dornstag 199, 387, spellings like her both for the pronoun (976) and the prefix (768, 1441), and the demonstrative desen (: wesen) 301 prove unmistakably the dialect to be Middle German.

To fix more precisely the dialect within the mentioned territory we shall have to consider the following peculiarities of the MS.: Rhymes like zît : riet 1275; hie : ergê 1149; brot : gluot 509, antpot : muot 737, gebot : guot 1133, tuon : gon (gân) 1477: schôn 555; strûchen : buochen 1171, ûf : geschuof 1143; geschoben : ofen 1223; p instead of b in poten 146, 179, 611, 691 (boten 181, 735), antpot 737, ich pit 408, er pat 411, 419, pitet 1123, paten 585, pet 631, das pad 501, porten 1029, plat 1469. All these rimes and spellings point to Hesse as the author's home. As to his rime-technic see the appended Rime-Index.

The author's name is given (1512) as "Isaac the scribe." Who that Isaac was is difficult to say with any degree of certainty. Possibly it was Isaac ben Eliezer of Worms, an ethical writer who flourished at Worms from 1460 to 1480, and who wrote in Hebrew-German an ethical and ascetic treatise under the title of Sepher ha-Gan (Cracow, about 1580). Not only do the linguistic peculiarities of our MS. agree with what we know of the medieval dialect of Worms, but also the age of the language. For although our MS. is dated 1544 (see verse 1521), yet that date can only refer to the actual writing down of the MS. and not to the original work, which both by its composition and vocabulary points to a higher age, at least the fifteenth century (See our Index of words).

The sources of the Paraphrase are the various midrashic works to the Book of Esther, which are so numerous that no other biblical book can compare with it in this respect. He mostly used the talmudic treatise, Megillah, Esther Rabba,