Abstract
The majority of new words in dictionaries are included following a certain period of time during which they have become more frequent in use and established morphosyntactic and orthographic features consistent with the language system they are borrowed into. In case of borrowed new words, inclusion often takes place at a transitional state of assimilation to the language system, where delayed orthographic or phonetic change cannot be ruled out and the differentiation between standard-conforming and non-standard orthographic word forms of a lemma oftentimes depends on the proximity between the writing systems of the donor and the recipient language. Following a brief overview of loan words and their lexicographical description in the Neologismenwörterbuch, a specialized online dictionary for neologisms in contemporary German, this paper presents findings of an investigative case study on dictionary entries for a neologism borrowed from a logographic language system and discusses the potential of a corpus-based description of new loan words.
Highlights
For a dictionary maker, the question as to when a word borrowed from another language can be considered fully lexicalized marks only the beginning of further thorough considerations and conclusions
Following an overview of loan words and their lexicographical description in the Neologismenwörterbuch (NWB), a specialized online dictionary for neologisms in contemporary German, this paper discusses issues concerning the grapheme–phoneme-correspondence of orthographic and phonetic information given by common German print dictionaries and evaluates the corpus-based approach to the description of new loan words applied in the NWB
The results of the investigative case study on Qigong confirm the hypothesis that the degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence correlates with the stability of a lemma’s integration into the German language system
Summary
The question as to when a word borrowed from another language can be considered fully lexicalized marks only the beginning of further thorough considerations and conclusions. Aside from yearly additions to the ongoing decade, it is possible to add entries for past decades later on and to alter existing entries at any time It currently comprises 2055 lemma entries, spanning almost three decades from the beginning of the 1990s up until today, that provide information about meaning and usage, spelling and pronunciation, grammatical features, frequent word formation patterns and collocations, and details regarding the etymology or connotation of a neologism. Since the majority of borrowed neologisms is characterized by an overall slower lexicalization, which can be attributed to specific morphosyntactic features of German (e.g. assignment of grammatical gender, development of an inflectional system for verbs and adjectives) (cf Lemnitzer 2010) and their orthographical and phonetical alignment, new loan words are assessed in terms of the degree of their integration into the German language system and the degree of their assimilation to standard orthography and pronunciation Just like native neologisms, borrowed neologisms included in the NWB are detected, evaluated and described based on frequency, distribution and degree of lexicalization. Since the majority of borrowed neologisms is characterized by an overall slower lexicalization, which can be attributed to specific morphosyntactic features of German (e.g. assignment of grammatical gender, development of an inflectional system for verbs and adjectives) (cf. Lemnitzer 2010) and their orthographical and phonetical alignment, new loan words are assessed in terms of the degree of their integration into the German language system and the degree of their assimilation to standard orthography and pronunciation
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