Older German Loan-Words in American English

Abstract

THE IMPORTANCE of loan-words as marks of the extent and nature of 1 the cultural influence of one linguistic community on another is widely recognized. Otto Jespersen, stating that loan-words 'might . . . be termed some of the milestones of general history, because they show us the course of civilization,'l illustrated his dictum by hundreds of examples of borrowings in older English from the Scandinavians, from the French, and from Latin and Greek. Walter Kaulfers writing that 'Scarcely a better index of the basic influence of foreign cultures can be found than the kind and number of words which find their way into everyday speech,'2 supported his thesis by listing hundreds of French words which are familiar to speakers of present-day American English. Similar examples of the impact of German culture on the Englishspeaking world are numerous, and the fields in which borrowing has taken place are fairly well known. Mary S. Serjeantson has collected and discussed the older loan-words;3 she has arranged them chronologically and topically from the unique (and doubtful) Old English loan4 from High German down through the nineteenth century. Charles T. Carr,5 relying mainly on the Oxford Dictionary for his material, has by including loan-translations brought in a much larger body of material, which he has arranged by centuries, half-centuries, and decadess and classified according to the field of knowledge to which they belong. His study records 820 words, of whlch he estimates that not more than 200 are sin ordinary English' (p. 88). Edward Taube has supplernented Carr's study by his article 'German Influence on the English Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century.'7 Taube makes no separation into British and American English although a few of his examples would seem to be in use chiefly on this side of the Atlantic.