German Loanwords Research Articles

German Loanwords in English: An Historical Dictionary (review)

Reviews255 German Loanwords in English: An Historical Dictionary. 1994. Ed. J. Alan Pfeffer and Garland Cannon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. xxxiv + 381 pp. $85.00. German Loanwords in English: An [sic] Historical Dictionary (GLE) byJ. Alan Pfeffer and Garland Cannon (henceforth P & C) aims to be a major revaluation of the German lexical contribution to English. P & C emphasize in dieir introduction (xix) that earlier estimates by Skeat (1910), Serjeantson (1935), and Pyles and Algeo (1982) of German influence on English are grossly inadequate . In place of Serjeantson's list of 77 German loanwords, P & C come up widi a total of 5,380 items. The body of GLE, a dictionary of these 5,380 words containing part-of-speech labels, date of introduction into English, semantic field labels, etymologies, English definitions, and odier information, is preceded by two introductory essays, "An [sic] historical overview by semantic fields" (3-110) and "Linguistic overview" (113-32). The use of"historical dictionary" in the subtide—ifwe understand by "historical dictionary" an arrangement of lexemes accompanied by a chronological display of evidence for dieir use—is misleading . The introductory "Historical overview by semantic fields" contains a rearrangement of die words in die A to Z body of die dictionary by date of introduction into English; diis is the sole element of a historical character in GLE. One's initial impression is diat P & C have brought off a scholarly coup. How is it possible diat so many German loanwords have sneaked in under die noses, so to speak, of past investigators? A quick answer suggests itself from the most cursory look at GLE: the overwhelming majority ofitems in the body ofthe book are either loan translations or Greco-Latin scientific coinages, and hence not obviously ofGerman origin, or else are such patendy German words (Abwehr, Achtung Anschauung augenphüohgie, Ausländer, to cite some entries in the letter A) , diat it is far from obvious that diey are English words. All the items, in fact, are in monolingual English dictionaries, on which P & C have relied almost exclusively in making decisions bodi as to whether a word is etymologically German and as to whether a word is lexically English. The "lexical corpus" (113) from which P & Cs 5,380 items have been drawn, as die authors acknowledge repeatedly, consists solely of the major Anglo-American dictionaries of the past century, in particular die OED and W3, and each entry contains an abbreviation representing the dictionary or dictionaries in which die word was found. (A more accurate subtide for the book dian "Historical Dictionary" would be "Compilation of German Loanwords in English Dictionaries.") Consequendy, the value of GLE is crucially dependent on how P & C utilize dieir sources, and, as it turns out, GLE is a flawed assessment of German lexical influence on English precisely because of the audiors' lack of reflectiveness about what dictionaries contain and how dictionaries etymologize words. On the broadest level, P & C have fallen into difficulties because they have not attended toJames Murray's maxim, in the "General Explanations" preceding the first fascicle ofdie OED, diat "die vocabulary ofa widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite 256Reviews limits." Vocabulary is by its nature not quantifiable because it expands continually on every occasion that someone writing chooses to write on a subject not previously written about. The knowledge explosion of the last half-millennium, better characterized as a discourse explosion, constandy begets new vocabulary as we have written about and have talked about tilings not previously discussed. The more vocabulary expands, die more a vocabulary list becomes an index of information, and die boundary between an encyclopedia (an index of knowledge ) and a dictionary (an inventory of a language's lexicon) has the potential to blur. In Anglo-American lexicography, this boundary has simply dissolved. Since Murray and the NewEnglish Dictionary, along widi die nearly contemporary Century Dictionary, English dictionaries of the "unabridged" variety have tended to be more and more inclusive of lexical items that other lexicographical traditions —say in France, Germany, or Russia—would consign to encyclopedias. Dictionaries now record, often in scattershot fashion, some portion of the macrolexicon of a language, i.e., the sum total of all lexical...

German loanwords in English: an historical dictionary

German loanwords in English: an historical dictionary

Etymology of dialectal Swedish nårot and narg as reflected by Balto-Finnic loanwords: Finnish naarmu ‘scratch, scar’, Estonian näru ‘rag, tatter, frazzle’

ABSTRACTThe Swedish dialectal words nårot ‘worn-out’ and narg ‘a piece of wornout cloth’ have not been etymologically treated so far. I here connect them with a family of Balto-Finnic words, likewise still lacking an etymology: Finn. naarmu ˜ narvas (<*narwa−), Est. näru (<*narwo-) and narvas ˜ narmas, etc. In these Balto-Finnic words, the -v- has in most attested forms undergone a sound substitution to -m-, known to have taken place in some Germanic loan words in Balto-Finnic. I propose that the above dialectal Swedish words can be explained as old wō/wa–stems, related to West Germanic words like Ger. Narbe, OE nearwian ‘to constrain’, etc. Thus, it appears that Finn, narvas-, naarmu, Est. näru, etc. are Proto-Germanic loan words in Balto-Finnic, and that the words later died out in the Germanic languages, only to be retrievable through dialectal Norwegian and North Swedish data and reconstructable through comparison with the Balto-Finnic loan words.

German Loanwords in American English

German Loanwords in American English

German Loanwords in English: An Historical Dictionary

Acknowledgments Primary sources Abbreviations used in this book Semantic field labels Introduction 1. An historical overview by semantic fields J. Alan Pfeffer 2. Linguistic overview Garland Cannon 3. The dictionary 4. Appendix Loanwords Conclusion.

German Loanwords Related to Foods and Drinks

The English language, as any other spoken language, has undergone many changes in the course of time. It was and still is influenced by other languages and has incorporated many foreign language elements. This is particularly the case for English spoken in America, where people of numerous nationalities live together speaking a common language. Over the centuries, several million German speaking people immigrated to the United States and brought with them not only their cultural, political, and religious beliefs, but also a language which was their common denominator. From

Untersuchungen zum Russisch-niederdeutschen Gesprächsbuch des Tönnies Fenne, Pskov 1607: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte By an Autorenkollektiv under the direction of Hans Joachim Gernentz (review)

BOOK NOTICES 193 & Fodor, since, according to G, their theory has been particularly influential in psycholinguistics . Certain inadequacies with model-theoretic semantics are also pointed out, but it is not clear that they are inherent in this approach and could not be remedied by extending semantic and pragmatic theory within the model-theoretic framework. Since this thesis was published 6 years after it was written, a 20-page postscript has been added to cover recent theoretical and experimental work. There have been exciting developments in this area since 1981 . G discusses the work of Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Bonnie Lynn Webber, Hans Kamp, Irene Heim, Jon Barwise & John Perry, and Philip JohnsonLaird , all of which is consistent with the ideas advanced by G. Perhaps the biggest omission is a formally precise account of mental models, but the experimental evidence should prove revealing to anyone interested in discourse representation . [Alex Franz, University of Pittsburgh.] Untersuchungen zum Russisch-niederdeutschen Gesprächsbuch des Tönnies Fenne, Pskov 1607: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte. By an Autorenkollektiv under the direction of Hans Joachim Gernentz . Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988. Pp. 267. DM 42.00. The facsimile copy of the unique manuscript of a Russian-Low German conversation manual by one Tönnies Fenne, a late Hanseatic merchant in Pskov during the Russian 'Time of Troubles', was published in Copenhagen, 1961, as a first volume under the title Tönnies Fenne's Low German manual ofspoken Russian, Pskov 1607, edited by L. L. Hammerich, Roman Jakobson , and others. A second volume. Transliteration and translation, was published in 1970. Projected third and fourth volumes, analyzing the manuscript's Russian and Low German language materials respectively, have not appeared. Since the appearance of Transliteration and translation, Soviet Slavicists especially have studied the (Old) Russian texts of Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual. Publication of studies dealing with the manual and its (Middle) Low German texts, however, was to await the volume under review here, representing the efforts of an author-collective made up of East German Germanists at the University of Rostock and Latvian Germanists at the University of Riga. It should be noted particularly that the subtitle of the volume reflects the author-collective 's view that its 'investigations' are a contribution to the history of (modern) German— that is, High German, not Low German. In the first chapter (13-86) Hans Joachim Gernentz, Tamara Korol, and Irmtraud Rosler locate Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual in both its textual tradition and its historical setting of Hanseatic-Russian trade. In the relatively short second chapter (87-103), Ilga Brizna compares the manual's Low German and Russian personal common names. The third chapter (105-237) comprises three separate studies: Christa Prowatke on the conversation manual's Low German vowel spellings (105-47); Christa Kopplow on the function and form of its Low German clauses (149-92); and Reinhold Tippe on the formation of its Low German complex substantive stems (193-237). In a completely unrelated appendix (239-52), Kira Kalnina discusses the phonological form and semantic sphere of Middle Low German loanwords in Lettish. A bibliography (253-67) follows the appendix. I have never understood the notion, shared by the author-collective of this volume, that the history of Low German is an integral part of the history of High German. To put it simple-mindedly and tautologically, the history of Low German is the history of Low German and the history of High German is the history of High German. [B. J. Koekkoek, State University of New York at Buffalo.] Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 210.) Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1988. Pp. viii, 445. DM 158.00. This collection of 'thirty-three papers read at a symposium on problems of lexical semantics at the University of Essen from November 19 to 21, 1987 ... provides readers,' the editors believe , 'with a representative sample of current investigations into the field' (1). The list of contributors (444-5) suggests, however, some limits on representation. Though all the papers but ...

German Loanwords in English

German Loanwords in English

Middle Low German Loanwords in Russian

Middle Low German Loanwords in Russian

German Loanwords in American English, a Bibliography of Studies, 1872-1978

THIS BIBLIOGRAPHY lists publications on American-English loanwords, loan morphemes, and loan translations from standard German and High German dialects. Studies of Yiddish and Dutch influences are not included. Section A of the bibliography lists the main works that deal with German loans in American English. Section B lists works that discuss only one or two lexical items, that concentrate on German loanwords in British English, or that have promising titles but contain little information. The bibliography was compiled from the following sources: American Speech, Publication of the American Dialect Society, Dialect Notes, the major periodicals and bibliographies on German language in America and German-English language contact, and the footnotes and bibliographies of the works cited. Most of the state examination theses and dissertations written in Germany are not readily available, and therefore not all of them were examined.

The semantic base of gender in German

This paper notes earlier work on the morphological basis for gender in German, and argues instead for the semantic basis of ‘deep’ gender. Research was based on a test of artificial words whose endings were drawn from English loan words in German, with morphological features presented, first alone, then reinforced by the semantic context, and finally in conflict. The discussion centers on the gender conflict resolution (morphological vs semantic) and presents statistical evidence supporting the view that the semantic features are dominant.

The Informational Value of Germanic Loanwords into Finnish

The Informational Value of Germanic Loanwords into Finnish

German Loanwords in Russian, 1550-1690

German Loanwords in Russian, 1550-1690

German Loanwords in Russian 1550-1690

German Loanwords in Russian 1550-1690

German Loanwords in Russian 1550-1690

German Loanwords in Russian 1550-1690

Anglo-American Influence on German Sport Terms

IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED 'English and American Sport Terms in German,' Theodore McClintock states that 'even before the war [the First World War] the English word sport had found its way into the standard German dictionaries' and that 'since that time many more English words have been adopted by German sport writers.'2 He adds that some of these words were so well known that they were applied to other activities and that additional words were adopted which have a perfectly good German equivalent. Another, more complete, study3 of the use of English words in German by Agnes B. Stiven also mentions sport loanwords, including a few words not in the McClintock list. That these two lists now need to be brought up to date is obvious. Therefore it is the purpose of this study, first, to note which English sport terms current in German in the 193os according to McClintock and Stiven are still included in recent German dictionaries, and, second, to discuss a list of new English sport words found by the writer in typical German newspapers and popular weekly illustrated magazines published since I955.4 This list is, of course, not a definitive one since it represents the findings of one person reading in several German publications for a given period of time, but it will suffice to indicate the continued use of English sport loanwords in German since the McClintock and Stiven studies. Checking the McClintock and Stiven lists in several standard German dictionaries,5 we find the following words still listed:

On Italian loan-words in German

On Italian loan-words in German

Remarks on Some English Loanwords in German

Remarks on Some English Loanwords in German

Some English Loanwords in German

Some English Loanwords in German

Older German Loan-Words in American English

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.