German Word Research Articles

Lithuanian equivalents of German nominal compounds in an anonymous German-Lithuanian manuscript from the 17th century Lexicon Lithuanicum

This paper analyses Lithuanian equivalents of German nominal compounds in an anonymous bilingual dictionary of the 17th century Lexicon Lithuanicum. 1208 words translated into Lithuanian were used for the analysis of the German compounds. Firstly, the article focuses on the Lithuanian equivalents, which are simple words (simplicias) and word phrases (syntagms), then the German words translated into Lithuanian as derivatives and compound nouns are described. The presented data are compared with the research results of other manuscripts (bilingual dictionaries C and B) from the 17th–18th centuries.
 According to the research data, the majority of the German nominal compounds recorded in the dictionary were translated into Lithuanian by simple words or syntagms. Almost a half of the German compounds were rendered into Lithuanian as derivatives, very often represented by suffixation. Lithuanian compound nouns, which serve as equivalents of German compounds make up only about 10 percent of the analyzed words, and are usually represented by N+N word-formation type.

WAYS TO REPLENISH THE VOCABULARY OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE WITH GERMAN BORROWINGS

The problem of lexical borrowing occupies one of the main places in linguistics, since the borrowing of foreign words is one of the ways to replenish the vocabulary of the language of any people. The reasons for borrowing are very diverse: this is the need to nominate new items, and some cultural superiority of the German nation in certain areas of activity, and the presence of bilingualism, and the spread of fashion for German. But the main reason should be considered the historical ties between the Russian and German peoples, since in the process of their relationship the need for borrowing was revealed. True, the etymological analysis of this vocabulary suggests that in most cases these are not native words in German, so we consider it appropriate, considering borrowings from German in Russian, to single out purely German words (group A), German words that came into Russian language through an intermediary language (group B), words that appeared in Russian from German, but are ultimately traced back to other languages (group C), and words that were influenced by two or more intermediary languages, one of which was German (group D). The research is based on actual data obtained by different linguists, and on the results of the author's own observations.

Related to the Problem of Word Formation in German

The problem of word production, together with its many models, forms, and styles of expression. This article investigates the challenges surrounding the development of words in German, as well as the viewpoints of a number of scientists who have dealt with these topics. Concurrently, the categorization of these things in accordance with the semantic principle is being spoken about as well.

Tender Violence, Coercive Simplicity, Geschlecht III: An Introduction

This introduction to the special issue asks, in the company of Jacques Derrida’s recently ‘rediscovered’ seminar Geschlecht III, what it might mean to read this text against the grain of everything that is said in the German word Geschlecht, including the gesture of having made an archival discovery and its attendant enforcements of recovered origins, philological-genealogical authority, familial unity and consonance of signification. It reflects on how returning to Heidegger gives Derrida the opportunity to take stock of the risks and structural inequities inherent in texts and their legacies, and from which Heidegger retreats in the very instances he insists on his own attention to textual and philosophical idiomaticity. We explore how, for Derrida, Heidegger is indebted to a tradition of thinking sameness in difference that coerces conciliation in the name of achieving a ‘tender duality’ between pairs. With Derrida, we argue that Heidegger’s thinking on the two-in-need-of-compromise conceals a violence of domination or subordination to the gentle tones of simplicity and gathering. We ask, finally, what it means to specify (domestic, racial, anthropocentric) unicity as ‘good’ and what this implies for reading archives and legacies once we understand such specification as a form of coercion and violence.

Rozwój semantyczny germańskiego *steur-: pale, stery, kotwice, pręty łoziny i chowane kile

This article discusses the relationship between the Old Germanic words for ‘a rudder’: Old Norse stýri / stjórn, Old High German stiura, Old English steor, etc., and Old Norse staurr, ‘a (pointed) stake’. These words in all probability stand in an ablaut relation to each other but it is difficult to tell what the cognitive link might be. The standard answer is that a stýri etc. originally was a beam/log/pole, understood as something similar to an oar, used to steer a ship. But it is difficult to steer a ship with a beam, log or pole, and a steering oar does not look much like these things. My suggestion is that a stýri etc. originally was more or less the same as a staurr, namely a pole which goes down into a substance that provides resistance and which thus anchors something. On the earliest depictions of ships with stýris etc. in Northern Europe, which are rowing ships, it seems that the function of the stýri was not to give the ship direction but to prevent it from drifting sideways on the water. On a stjóri ‘primitive anchor’ (Old Norse), the decisive element is a pointed transverse at the bottom end which digs into the ground. Similarly, a stjóri in Faroese is a rope or fastening whereby people and goods are pulled ashore through the surf. Norwegian stjor(e) also have meanings that are fundamentally similar to this. The essential argument for the proposed understanding is that it allows stýri/stjórn/stiura etc. to have an original meaning close to that of Old Norse staurr, which the etymological relatedness demands. Our semantic complex surrounding to steer, steuern, etc., probably co-evolved with the directional stýri etc. that accompanied the evolution of the Northern European sailing ship during the Merovingian age.

Investigating Social Media Potential for Supporting Teachers’ Digital Games Literacy

Digital games have the potential to address a variety of pedagogical objectives across a range of subject areas in education and research shows that teachers are interested to learn about the use of games in teaching. However, due to the lack of professional development opportunities, teachers typically learn about the use of games informally from their peers and on social media. This raises questions about the kind of knowledge that social media resources may be catering to teachers and their relevance for more formalized ways of game literacy development. Further, the reason for the lack of professional development options could be that research is lagging behind in testing and developing systemic models that frame teachers’ knowledge of game-based learning such as the recently proposed Game Literacy for Teacher Education (GLTE) framework. To address the research gap, we investigate the following question: How do social media resources address key literacy areas of the Game Literacy for Teacher Education framework? The study tests the GLTE framework to investigate the research question. Data has been collected between autumn 2021 to spring 2022 from YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter using 1) search words in English, German and Swedish, 2) built-in recommendations and discovery functions, and 3) following links and references. Data relevant to supporting teachers in Digital Game-based Learning (DGBL) at primary and secondary levels in education were included, and 150 multimedia resources were selected for further analysis. Data were deductively coded onto the broad categories of the GLTE framework and descriptive coding was used to explore new categories. Findings show that DGBL resources shared on social media address the key literacy areas of the GLTE framework at least partially while also indicating that conceptualisations of games literacy for teachers need to go beyond technological and pedagogical integration and consider the broader societal role of games and gaming. Based on the findings we propose that game literacy for teachers is conceptualised from a broader social-cultural, critical perspective, and we suggest an updated model and recommendations for future research

Mindful language learning: The effects of college students’ mindfulness on short-term vocabulary retention

Educators are increasingly implementing holistic approaches into the foreign language classroom, with one popular method being mindfulness. Mindfulness has been associated with better grades and well-being in higher education. However, no study has yet explored the language-specific relationship between mindfulness and second language acquisition (SLA). This study investigated the relationship between the mindfulness level of 269 Japanese undergraduates and their ability to learn new L3 words in German. The study further examined the extent to which different domains of mindfulness were related to the ability to learn new vocabulary, as well as the relationship between mindfulness and the different vocabulary test parts (receptive, productive, grammatical gender). Correlation and multiple regression analyses revealed that higher mindfulness was associated with better vocabulary retention. In particular, the mindfulness dimension “Acting with Awareness” was key for all connections. Notably, the L1 and L3 parts showed a different relationship with different mindfulness dimensions: “Non-judging” was crucial for the productive part and “Observing” was decisive for the receptive part. These findings indicate that mindfulness not only improves general academic performance, but also has a direct relationship with SLA. Finally, this suggests that mindfulness training for students may be a novel approach to facilitate vocabulary learning.

Boring! The Performative Invisibility and Non-theatricality of Asian Americans in Higher Education

Boring! The Performative Invisibility and Non-theatricality of Asian Americans in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei (bio) Art objects occasionally perform an act of negation, some classic examples being Ce n’est pas une pipe (1929) by René Magritte and Le Vide (1958) by Yves Klein. The negation or lack of the object challenges the fundamental meaning of the subject’s gaze and complicates the relationship between the subject and object. Why does an object need to be negated, hidden, or erased in order to say something? What does the performative MIA (missing in action) tell us about the social and performance milieu? If the utterance of the missing object is not heard or cared for—that is, no one even notices its absence—does the object ever exist? On the eve of the pandemic lockdown, two site-specific installation performances at the University of California, Irvine—Looking for an Asian American Play (February 11–12, 2020) and Viral Compassion (March 5, 2020)—sought to examine the performative (in)visibility—and to challenge the perception of (non)theatricality—of Asian Americans on university campuses. While in the United States in early 2020 COVID-19 was seen as an Asian virus “over there,” I became aware of the renewed scapegoating rhetoric and increasing violence against Asians and saw the urgency of creating these installation performances as a form of activism. “Theatre” on a college campus is an institution with specific spatial, temporal, ideological, and bureaucratic restrictions, [End Page E-59] functioning as a generally unwelcoming space for BIPOC artists as a result of Euro-American theatrical conventions. The general lack of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) representation in university theatre curricula and performance seasons not only is detrimental to the growth of Asian American theatre, but also affects the general ecology of theatre. My purpose in producing these installation performances in public space therefore was to confront the general public with Asian American existence/absence by temporally occupying a common space. Performativity and theatricality are interrelated in these two projects. In her Installation Art: Between Image and Stage, Anne Ring Petersen extensively discusses performativity and theatricality in installation performance. Performativity, she suggests, can be better understood by the German word hervorbringend, which Juliane Rebentisch used as a synonym for “performative.” Hervorbringen refers to the attempt to “bring out” (the intention of the artist) as well as “bring forth” (the viewer’s subjective interpretation).1 Claire Bishop describes the key characteristic of installation art as the experience of singular totality, which requires the viewers’ physical presence as well as their sensorial and embodied experience of both the space and the ensemble elements of the art.2 The performativity of an installation performance therefore depends on the viewers’ experience and interpretation. Theatricality, within the context of installation, can refer to the conscious staging, design, or choreography of the “scene,” or even “pathos-filled” artworks.3 Theatrical in design and content, the two works I discuss negotiate AAPI (non)theatricality through a dialectic and a performative process of engaging spectators. Looking for an Asian American Play took place in multiple locations on the UC Irvine campus, between the Langson Library and the Gateway Study Center, as well as inside the library. Langson Library is a large, five-story research library; the Study Center is a building of similar size comprising study rooms and other institutional spaces. Outside of these two big buildings are benches, tables and chairs, wide steps, and large concrete railings that can all be used as staging areas. The passers-by did not seem to notice that a performance was about to take place. The role of Professor (played by me) began by speaking to some students (actors and pedestrians): “Hello! Everyone! Attention, please. Today we are going to talk about Asian American plays . . .” Students (actors) interrupted her with various responses and questions: “Do Asians write plays?” “All the Asian people I know are doctors or engineers.” “Do you mean . . . like Bruce Lee or Peking Opera?” “Don’t you need to speak English?” (Together) “Asian American theatre does not exist!” A question was proposed by the crowd: “Where can we find Asian American plays?” Professor responded by setting up a...

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence by Julie Pfeiffer

Reviewed by: Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence by Julie Pfeiffer Morgan Foster Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence. By Julie Pfeiffer. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2021. x + 198 pp. Paper $30, cloth $99. Literary scholars have long discussed the history of books, but few have delved into the research done by Julie Pfeiffer in Transforming Girls. Her focus on nineteenth-century German and American girls' literature immediately separates her work from other scholarship examining girls' books, making this essential to scholars and others interested in adolescent literature, literary studies, book history, children's literature, girls' books, and more. [End Page 456] Pfeiffer focuses her work on Backfischliteratur, the German word referring to literature of the Backfisch. Literally, a Backfisch is a fish too small to be sold at market but too large to use as bait, and they were thus thrown into a boat's "back." Over time this word began referring to "the liminal status of a girl in her teens" and was used to "highlight the category of female adolescence" (13). It is a word, Pfeiffer explains, that appeared frequently in German girls' books throughout the nineteenth century, and she uses it to examine the "paradox of the nineteenth-century girls' book," which both focused on adolescence as a time of freedom and exploration in a girl's life while preparing her for marriage and life in a "patriarchal framework to be happy" (4). From there, Pfeiffer investigates a number of nineteenth-century German and American girls' novels and how they approached adolescence by category: the moral tale, the family story, and the orphan novel. Propelling her inquiry is a comparison of adolescence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century girls' books. Much of the Backfisch literature Pfeiffer cites described adolescence as a time of creativity, growth, and exploration. Young women left their country homes to be mentored and looked after in the city by "Othermothers" or various women they mets along their journeys. Pfeiffer reminds readers that teenagers were often viewed as a "vessel for anxieties about wild teenagers . . . rather than as a metaphor for transformation and growth" (25). Backfisch books offered an alternate way of modeling adolescence, one that helped the girl reader to find her place in her community in a way where she is supported and nurtured. Intimate relationships between the Backfisch and other women were encouraged and are the focus of much of the literature examined by Pfeiffer. As she points out, the focus on same-sex relationships is curious, since much of the Backfisch's experiences were meant to make her a good wife and mother. Over time, however, especially into the twentieth century, the Backfisch was allowed less room for exploration and mistakes: her adolescence became less of a protected time and instead something to endure or suffer through. This shifting idea of adolescence had implications for girls in real life and in literature, a compelling point that Pfeiffer returns to throughout Transforming Girls. An extensive and perhaps overly long introduction to both the Backfisch and the book overall will help all readers understand the terms she uses. Pfeiffer defines not only concepts, such as the Backfisch, that may be new or less familiar to readers, but also how she uses concepts such as girls' books. Her writing is accessible for many readers, and chapters are organized into several sections. Images from original texts appear throughout; they don't add much but are enjoyable to look at, as many of the books are out of print. Brevity is one of [End Page 457] Pfeiffer's strengths; her economy of language is impressive—at under two hundred pages, she packs an incredible amount of information into each chapter. My only quibble is her conclusion, which is overly brief at five pages. In it, she points to new ways of understanding contemporary girls' books and devotes much of the space to analyzing three examples of the Backfisch in them, making the conclusion seem even more rushed given the new information that readers are getting. Nonetheless, Transforming Girls is a remarkable example of scholarship that points to new ways of understanding girls' books and adolescence in fiction, as well as...

Essays in honour of William E. Hockley: A Festschrift.

A Festschrift (the German word standing for feast-script) is a collection of essays to celebrate the significant contributions of a scholar to their respective field of studies. Here, it is our honour to introduce this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology as a Festschrift for William (Bill) E. Hockley to celebrate his rich scholarly contributions to the field of cognitive psychology, specifically on human memory. The diversity of articles in this issue highlights the depth and range of Bill's contributions to the study of human memory and cognition. We congratulate Bill on a successful career and thank him for his dedicated service to science and academia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Construction of German Machine Intelligent Translation System Based on Data Mining Algorithm

The continuous expansion of the international market makes more people pay attention to learning different languages. As one of the most popular languages, German is favored by scholars. The use of intelligent translation systems to learn German has become the main way of learning. The increasing development of science and technology is accompanied by the emergence of a large number of new German words. The traditional German intelligent translation system has a slow update speed of words and cannot recognize new words, which seriously affects the accuracy of the translation. According to these questions, in this paper, the data mining algorithm is introduced into the German machine intelligent translation system. By evaluating the German machine intelligent translation system using a data mining algorithm in four aspects: translation speed, accuracy rate, recall rate, and user satisfaction, the evaluation results found that the translation speed of the system increased by 4.68%, the accuracy rate increased by 4.2, the recall rate has increased by 3.8%, and the user satisfaction score has increased by 0.825 points. The data mining algorithm can improve the German machine intelligent translation system and users’ interest in learning and promote German education.

Ongoing Sign Processing Facilitates Written Word Recognition in Deaf Native Signing Children.

Signed and written languages are intimately related in proficient signing readers. Here, we tested whether deaf native signing beginning readers are able to make rapid use of ongoing sign language to facilitate recognition of written words. Deaf native signing children (mean 10 years, 7 months) received prime target pairs with sign word onsets as primes and written words as targets. In a control group of hearing children (matched in their reading abilities to the deaf children, mean 8 years, 8 months), spoken word onsets were instead used as primes. Targets (written German words) either were completions of the German signs or of the spoken word onsets. Task of the participants was to decide whether the target word was a possible German word. Sign onsets facilitated processing of written targets in deaf children similarly to spoken word onsets facilitating processing of written targets in hearing children. In both groups, priming elicited similar effects in the simultaneously recorded event related potentials (ERPs), starting as early as 200 ms after the onset of the written target. These results suggest that beginning readers can use ongoing lexical processing in their native language – be it signed or spoken – to facilitate written word recognition. We conclude that intimate interactions between sign and written language might in turn facilitate reading acquisition in deaf beginning readers.

An Attempt at Describing Learning Curves for a Complex Sub-Task in Reading Acquisition

Learning curves are a well-known phenomenon in learning and describe the oscillation between correct and incorrect performance that precedes mastery. It demonstrates that making mistakes is part of the learning process. It is equally clear that these learning curves are highly individual and therefore pose a challenge in their description and direct comparison. With the ability to collect large amounts of data through learning games with adaptively generated content, it is now possible to take a novel look at this process. Literacy games were deployed in a school setting for the iRead EU Horizon 2020 Project. The Navigo app delivered a complex task of practising to distinguish vowel length in bi-syllabic words in German to pupils in the disguise of a game. Pupils' engagement with the game resulted in the largest longitudinal corpus that has ever been collected for this sort of task from 251 pupils in German elementary schools. The resulting data exhibits learning curves as trajectories, depicting response time and correctness across several weeks for each pupil’s playing sessions. The work presented here attempts to (a) model and parameterise these curves, (b) automate their classification into common forms across a larger population, and (c) detect mastery. In doing so, we propose a method of learning curve representation and interpretation and apply it to the data. A describable pattern of cognitive processing seems to be observable and common to all curves that may allow a prediction of mastery and ability for skill transfer to other environments for a subset of the players. As a result, we were able to describe five general types of common progressions. These findings are in part supported by additional data from pre- and post-tests in the form of paper-and-pencil activities. The work presented here should serve to demonstrate the importance of using large scale input data for training literacy skills rather than a few examples as is the norm in static schoolbooks.

Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany

Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany

Rhotics, /uː/, and diphthongization in New Braunfels German

Abstract This paper investigates the status of rhotics, /uː/, and the diphthongization of /eː/ and /oː/ in New Braunfels German, a variety of Texas German, a set of moribund dialects spoken in Texas. Boas, Hans C. (2009a. The life and death of Texas German. Durham: Duke University Press: 158) notes that “retroflex /ɻ/ appears … [mainly] in borrowed words.” He further assumes that New Braunfels German “differs from other German American dialects such as Pennsylvania German and Wisconsin German in that English sounds almost never appear in native German words” (160). The results discussed here indicate that this statement no longer holds true. Today, perceptual analysis and phonological measurements of Texas German Dialect Project data reveal that both American English retroflex approximants and diphthongs [eɪ] and [oʊ] appear frequently. Moreover, /uː/ is sometimes centralized/fronted with short/mid-long quality. Language attrition and language death, two mutually reinforcing variables, appear as the driving forces for these phenomena.

The Man in the Macintosh Is a Man in a Hat

The Man in the Macintosh Is a Man in a Hat John Gordon (bio) The man in the macintosh is a man in a hat, because every man of the time wore headgear. Hence, in "Counterparts," Farrington has a ruse, which depends on the reader's understanding that a man not taking his hat from its place on the hat-rack is not going outdoors.1 True in general, this is doubly true for "Hades." In that episode, men's hats—"[t]hese pots we have to wear"—are a major concern.2 "Hades" begins with Martin Cunningham's "silkhatted head" going into a carriage and ends with the unpleasantness over the dinge in John Henry Menton's hat (U 6.01). In between—in the street, in the chapel, at the gravesite—men's hats are repeatedly being taken off and put back on. The reason for this is obvious. "Hades" is about a funeral, and the doffing and donning of hats is a standard feature of the funeral ceremony, which in turn depends on the understanding that every male present will show up wearing one. So, perforce, the man in the macintosh wears one. If he did not, if he were the only perpetually bareheaded man in the company, he would have been noticed from the outset and not just because of his raincoat. Aside from Menton's dented bowler, there may be another notable hat present in the episode, unusual in one particular: it can render the wearer invisible. In his study of Ulysses Notebook VIII.A.5, Phillip F. Herring calls attention to Joyce's identification (confirmed in the Carlo Linati list of correspondences3) of John O'Connell with Hades, the Greek lord of the underworld, and then adds that in the same notes the German word "Tarnkappe" appears, which Roscher [Herring's source, W. H. Roscher's Ausführliches Lexikon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie4] uses to compare Hades' cloak of invisibility with that of Nordic mythology. Joyce's mystery man [the man in the macintosh] has two prominent characteristics: his macintosh and his elusiveness. This evidence suggests that both the caretaker John O'Connell and the Man in the Macintosh are avatars of Hades.5 I think that Herring has a point here but one that calls for some refurbishing. The idea seems to be that M'Intosh's macintosh is or in some way corresponds to the "Tarnkappe," which in turn means "cloak of [End Page 691] invisibility." But if that were so, he should be invisible by virtue of wearing it, and he is not. After all, there he is, in plain sight, macintosh and all. As for O'Connell, there is no indication that he is wearing any sort of remarkable cloak or coat. O'Connell is, however, wearing a hat. In fact, here is how he is introduced: "A portly man, ambushed among the grasses, raised his hat in homage" (U 6.708-09). That is, he comes into the field of vision at or about the moment he takes off his hat. The German "Tarn" means "camouflage." "Kappe" means "hood." A "Tarnkappe" can be either a hood (or cape) that renders the wearer, along with everything else he has on, invisible, or a hood (or hat) that does the same. A hood, after all, can plausibly be taken either as part of an article of outerwear or as a separate article of headwear. Also, "Kappe" sounds like "cap," a coincidence that may help explain why, in a search through Google Books entries for the years from 1850 to 1950, the first ten hits for "Tarnkappe" emerge in translation as "camouflage cap."6 Herring's assumption that the word means "cloak of invisibility," evidently tracing to Roscher, is an inference. All this is a recipe for muddle, and muddles there have been. In Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, Siegfried's "[h]elm" of invisibility—his "Tarnhelm"—can in the same translation both be called a "tarncap," that is, a cap, and described as conferring a "cloak of invisibility." Wikipedia's entry on Alberich, the dwarf whose brother forged the Tarnhelm, calls it, wrongly, a "Tarnkappe" (in fact...

The life and times of media events: A tribute to Elihu Katz

Abstract I have just learnt that Elihu Katz – a dearly loved friend and colleague – has died at the age of 95. This abstract is a valediction forbidding mourning. Media Events, written with Daniel Dayan, was the culminating work of a career spanning six decades – a career launched by Personal Influence, written with his doctoral supervisor, Professor Paul Lazarsfeld, of Columbia University, New York, and published in 1955. In my contribution to this issue, I try to do two things: firstly, to indicate how Media Events opened up a novel way of thinking about television and, at the same time, to think of it as a summa, the distillation of a lifetime’s work in the academic field of communication and media studies. I wanted especially to point towards its stimmung – that untranslatable ordinary German word for mood, or disposition: an attitude to life, the world, and television. I start with Katz’s earliest academic work – his master’s thesis completed at Columbia in the 1940s, felicitously but not accidentally called The Happiness Game. The stimmung of this work is the same as that of Media Events. That vision, as Daniel Dayan has claimed, was not a mirage. What he and Katz saw in La Télévision Céremoniélle (the book’s French title when he translated it) was every bit as true as the dominant academic view of the politics of television whose hegemonic sociological take on “the real world” they both attempted to counter.

Learning the two translations of translation-ambiguous words: Simultaneous vs. consecutive presentation

Some words have more than one translation across languages. Such translation-ambiguous words are harder to learn, recognize, and produce for individuals across the language learning spectrum. Past research demonstrates that learning both translations of translation-ambiguous words on consecutive trials confers an accuracy advantage relative to learning them on separate sessions. We tested the proposal that presenting the two translations of translation-ambiguous words simultaneously on the screen could facilitate the formation of a more integrated mapping, because this would enable learners to make direct comparisons between them, whether implicitly or explicitly. We predicted that this facilitation would especially hold for translation-ambiguous words with related translations. Fifty native English speakers learned 48 German words with one or two translations that varied in the meaning similarity of their translations. Paired associate training took place on a Monday, and a first language (L1) to second language (L2) translation production test took place on Wednesday and Friday. Generally, higher translation similarity facilitated translation speed. In accuracy, training condition interacted with the similarity of the translations; translation accuracy was more affected by translation similarity in the simultaneous condition and went up as similarity increased. Overall, the consecutive condition demonstrated higher accuracy and faster reaction times than the simultaneous training condition, suggesting that learners may have been unable to successfully divide their study time between multiple words on the screen without explicit instruction.

Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks by Paul Wexler

Reviewed by: Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks by Paul Wexler Tomasz Kamusella Wexler, Paul. Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks. Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, 10. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2021. Notes. References. Bibliography. Glossary. Indexes. Addenda. xvi + 1412 pp. €198.00 (2-volume hardback and e-book). This ground-breaking, encyclopaedic monograph is a fitting crown to interdisciplinary historical sociolinguist Paul Wexler’s research career of over six decades that brought him from the United States to Peru and Bolivia, Israel, Central and Eastern Europe, Nigeria, Japan, and recently to Australia. Traditionally-minded historians and linguists consider Wexler an iconoclast, because he dares to cross disciplinary lines and proposes novel hypotheses on the basis of new evidence and critical re-examinations of earlier finds. Thus far, his main claim to fame has been the theory that Yiddish is a Slavic language (Knaanic, or Judeo-Slavic), that in the late medieval and early modern periods was relexicalized with Germanic words (Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics, Leiden 1987), not unlike academic English, which is a Germanic tongue heavily relexicalized with Romance (that is, French and Latin) words. On this basis, Wexler came to the conclusion that Ivrit (Modern Hebrew) is none other than Yiddish relexicalized with Semitic words. As such, Ivrit is also a Slavic language, but twice removed from the medieval Knaanic’s dialectal (Sorbian) base in Lusatia (or today’s eastern Germany) (see Paul Wexler, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past, Wiesbaden, 1990). What prevented a calm discussion of Wexler’s theory are the two socio-political norms, developed in Europe, that currently underlie the state and intellectual structures of Western-style modernity. The conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) yielded the model of the confessionally homogenous territorial state, which in turn spawned the nation-state. In Central Europe, especially, following the Great War (1918), the ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state became the standard model of legitimate statehood. Until the Holocaust, most of the world’s Jews lived in this region. Under these normative influences, they began to see themselves as a mono-ethnic people (nation) created and confessionally united by Judaism. The Nazi genocide of Jews imbued this understanding with a racialized (biologizing) undertone which brushed off onto the new secular definition of Jewishness, as adopted in Israel. In addition, the polity is none other than a Central European ethnolinguistic nation-state located in the Middle East, with Ivrit having the function of its national language. Wexler’s theories and findings roam freely across the length and breadth of Eurasia and North Africa and often contradict these recent political norms, [End Page 355] much to various ideologues’ displeasure. The opus magnum under review emerged late during the first decade of the twenty-first century from Wexler’s attempt to plug the gap in scholarship with a sorely missing etymological dictionary of Yiddish (p. 21). He soon realized that such a dictionary had not been attempted earlier because the origins of common Yiddish words push lexicographers toward Slavic and other languages, well beyond German, with which Yiddish is traditionally coupled on cultural and ideological grounds (despite the fact that the Holocaust was planned and carried out by Germans). Early into the project, Wexler realized that he would not be able to do justice to the task because influences, be it on Knaanic, Yiddish or other Jewish languages that then fed into modern Yiddish (and Ivrit), touch upon too many ethnolinguistic and confessional groups strewn across Eurasia (including North Africa) during the past two millennia. Each linguistically-and historiographically-evidenced answer to an etymological issue tended to generate more questions that also needed to be looked into. In turn, his expansive work centres on the discussion and dictionary-style presentation of the origins and relations of almost 300 lexemes (or their groups), termed ‘Afro-Eurasian elements in Yiddish’ (pp...

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon