Post-1949 German loans in written English

Abstract

This is the fourth in a series of articles on post-1949 loans (a term that includes both loanwords and loan translations) which are recorded in standard English dictionaries, with the articles on Japanese, Spanish, and Arabic already published (Cannon 1994b, 1996a, 1997). This study on German is quite different because it contains numerous originally technical German coinings that, though utilizing classical rather than Germanic elements, should be considered as German items because they usually exhibit German spelling, pluralization, gender, articles, and noun capitalization, which have been adapted into English. The first known appearance of the total 253 items dates from 1950 to 1993, with considerable diminution since the 1960s. The leading semantic fields represented are, in order, politics, business, geology, food, health, and zoology. Only 42 are partial or loan translations; the others are loanwords, including a few abbreviations and other shortenings. There are 12 reborrowings, some of which supply the loanword for what was originally a loan translation in English. The collecting also turned up 326 post-1949 English neologisms built from German loans (including 55 from the 253 new items), as functional shifts, derivations, compounds, etc. All these data hold interesting implications for language, language contact, and language change, with reciprocal influences of English on German that have the potential for affecting the German system of grammatical gender.