German borrowings in English in the early 20 century (lexicographic survey)

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German borrowings in English in the early 20 century (lexicographic survey)

Polishchuk G.V.

Volodymyr Vynnychenko Central Ukrainian State Pedagogical University

The article focuses on a lexicographic investigation of foreign words with specialfocus on German borrowing in the English language in the early 20 century (E20).

Language distribution of the research proved that German donated vocabulary into English in E20. Historical background was studied for better understanding of the respective cultural standards of English and German and the effect of lexical influence of German.

The article proposes the qualitative and quantitative interpretation of German words: in the language distribution (out of 38 languages) 10,6 % offoreign words were borrowed from German in E20. It was proved that words from different semantic domains differ in their borrowability.

As German has been estimated to be the language of the superior ethnonational group, out of all semantic groups 22 % of words were registered as belonging to politics and history of Nazi ideology. Other semantic groups of borrowing were determined due to its frequency (food, wine - 17,7 %, sport, music, art and literature - 20 %, psychology - 5 %, etc.).

High borrowability of nouns has been found out due to their semantic function as designations of new things, the need for differentiation, and a general need for renewal.

The prominence of nouns over non-nouns was explained by their relative frequency in the receiving language. that has been proved by data: 86% of borrowed German words in E20 are nouns, compound nouns in particular.

The material clearly demonstrated that in our experimental language distribution English displays the tendency to borrow nouns more than any other parts ofspeech.

The author hopes that the presented classification of borrowed vocabulary of E20 performed on the basis of lexicographic investigation and existing theoretical knowledge about German influence on English can serve as an effective foundation for unification of scientific views in the field of English etymology and is of direct practical relevance.

Key words: etymology, English of the early 20 century, language distribution, German borrowings, semantic groups, parts of speech.

Поліщук Г.В. НІМЕЦЬКІ ЗАПОЗИЧЕННЯ В АНГЛІЙСЬКІ МОВІ ПОЧАТКУ 20 СТОЛІТТЯ (ЛЕКСИКОГРАФІЧНИЙ ОГЛЯД)

У статті автором запропоновано результати суцільного лексикографічного обстеження іноземних слів, зокрема німецьких запозичень, у словниковому складі слів англійської мови, зафіксованих на початку 20 століття (1900-1939 рр.). Мовна дистрибуція експериментального матеріалу доводить вплив німецької мови на словниковий склад англійської мови у 1900-1939 роках 20 століття. Значушість німецької мови проаналізовано з урахуванням історичного підґрунтя розвитку досліджуваних мов. У статті запропоновано кількісну та якісну інтерпретацію запозичень: серед 38 мов, зафіксованих у матеріалі спостереження, 10,6 % запозичень належить саме запозиченням з німецької мови. Доведено, що ступінь запозичення іноземних слів залежить від їхньої приналежності до різних семантичних груп. Оскільки німецьку мову визначено як найвищу етнонаціональну мову, 22 % запозичень у матеріалі спостереження було зафіксовано як такі, що належать до семантичного поля «політика, історія ідеології нацистів». Проаналізовано також наступні семантичні групи запозичень (їжа, напої - 17,7 %, спорт, музичні терміни, мистецтво та література - 20 %, психологія - 5 % тощо). Установлено високий ступінь запозичення іменників з німецької мови. Перевага запозичення саме цієї частини мови пояснена частотністю їх уживання: 86 % запозичень з німецької мови становлять іменники. Експериментальний матеріал роботи чітко демонструє тенденцію англійської мови до запозичення іменників, на перевагу інших частин мови, переважно складних іменників. Автор висловлює надію, що запропоноване лексикографічне обстеження та класифікація запозиченого німецького вокабуляра початку 20 століття у поєднанні з існуючим теоретичним підґрунтям послуговує ефективною базою для уніфікації наукових розвідок у царині етимології англійської мови та матиме релевантне практичне застосування.

Ключові слова: етимологія, англійська мова, початок 20 століття, мовний розподіл, німецькі запозичення, семантичні групи, частини мови.

Introduction

german loanword english language

The paper covers foreign words in English from a synchronic perspective, with special focus on German borrowings in English. The complete list of collected terms dated 1900-1929 (early 20^th century, E20) consists of words and phrases which come from different languages taken from Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases (2010) in order to establish an understanding of the productivity of a loan word which has stood the test of time from the early twentieth century to current contemporary English. Thus, the meaning(s) of the borrowed word as used in E20; the word class(es) it is assigned to and derived and inflected forms of the feature and their meanings were planned to establish.

424 foreign words were identified and examined in total, and an overview of their distribution across different semantic fields is presented helping to discuss relative trends in the development of modern English lexicon. As has been already stated, the aim of this research is to study language distribution within the English E20 lexicon with special focus on German borrowings in English determining its semantic domain. The discussed items were grouped according to the language they come from, starting from the languages which donated the most vocabulary: 86,6 % (French, German, Latin, Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Spanish, Japanese, American Spanish, Greek, Sanskrit, Hindi) and the following popular categories have been suggested: history, politics, words of general character, administrative terms/law/government, music (dance/songs), fashion (clothes/names of fabric), military, sport, theology/religion, cookery (dishes/beverages (wine vocabulary)/ desserts), slang/colloquial usage, art/ literature and others. It goes without saying that mutual enrichment of languages is a historical inevitability and these ties obligatorily brought to the enrichment of each of these languages. Consequently, the knowledge of the origins of words helps to cover the cultural background that has shaped the semantics of modern English vocabulary.

Results

Borrowings play a great role in the languages. At present there is not a single language, the vocabulary of which consists of its own words. If there is one, that means that it not a developed language. Associated with modern development people of the world are economically, scientifically, economically, politically are closely connected with one another. This process creates a background for approaching the languages closer to one another, resulting in borrowing words from one another: “It can never happen so, that any language without being subjected to the influence of any other language could develop. On the contrary, the influence of the neighboring languages played a great role in its development” [3, p. 157-158]). As it has been stated, all languages borrow words from other languages, but some languages are more prone to borrowing, while others borrow less, and different domains of the vocabulary are unequally susceptible to borrowing. Languages typically borrow words when a new concept is introduced, but languages may also borrow a new word for an already existing concept. Linguists describe two causalities for borrowing: need,

i. e., the internal pressure of borrowing a new term for a concept in the language, and prestige, i.e., the external pressure of borrowing a term from a more prestigious language [4]. As prestige is considered to be a social phenomenon, the use of loanwords is not merely a lexical act (filling a lexical gap in a given language, or using a shorter word in place of a longer expression) but also a socially meaningful one -a contextual expression of self, social identity and language regard. Thus, scientists state that recent lexical borrowing research has drawn attention to this social meaning potential of loanwords; the interface between speakers (the social dimension) and language (the linguistic dimension) with regard to lexical borrowing must be debated, and to probe how language regard and speaker identity influence and explain the use of loanwords [5].

So, it goes without saying that borrowing is a widely discussed topic in scientific literature that has recently attracted the attention of modern scholars, who have focused on the role of borrowings in the history of the English language [6; 2; 3; 7], special borrowing in English from different languages [10], the relationship between structure and meaning of borrowings [5], the investigation of interlanguage contact [8], the results of contacts among the languages [3], social meaning potential of loanwords [5], semantic field arrangement of borrowed words and differences among semantic fields [13].

Word etymology gives us a glimpse into the evolution of words in a language. Words may be adopted from a language because of cultural, scientific, economic, political or other reasons. In time these words “adjust” to the language that adopted them - their sense may change to various degrees - but they are still semantically related to their etymological roots [6, p. 52]. So, taking into account the establishment of English as the de facto lingua franca, a great number of words have been borrowed into the English language and borrowing continues. No one will deny that nowadays English continues borrowing words from other languages with an unprecedented reach, as borrowing has played a crucial role in the history of the English lexicon - and still does. As an example, some 10,000 words were adopted from French between 1250 and 1400, and roughly 75 per cent ofthem are still used nowadays. We have already thoroughly analyzed huge impact of French on English [7, p. 210] covering the historical and social conditions of the time, the relations between the conquerors and conquered, the language used by the two races, their respective standards of culture etc. As it has been mentioned before, German occupies the second place out of 38 languages supplying words into English in the early 20 century, so it is considered useful to present detailed analysis of it, especially due to the fact that in scientific literature it hadn't been carefully described. As mentioned by R. Berndt, nautical or similar terms associated with trade made their way into English from Dutch and Low German during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, e.g., cruise, brandy, dollar and others; painters' terms such as sketch, landscape and others were adopted during the flourishing period of the Dutch school of painting in the seventeenth century and certainly, well-known German borrowings in Modern English times: nickel, schnitzel, schnapps, waltz, kindergarten, leitmotiv, rucksack, blitz and others [8, c. 66-67]. So, German according to the definition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, is West Germanic, spoken mainly in Germany and in Austria, and used with others, as an official language in Switzerland and Luxembourg and as a regional form in the Italian Tyrol and elsewhere. Divided historically into two main dialect areas, Low German, roughly north of a line from south of Magdeburg to the frontier with Belgium, and High German, to the south. The criterion is whether or not forms underwent the so-called `Second Sound Shift'. Old High German is the language of the earliest texts (before the late 11 century). The rise and spread of the modern standard was a gradual process, from the early 16century, when Luther translated the Bible into his own East Saxon dialect, to the 19<sup>th</sup> [9, p. 157]. For trade and commerce, exploration, colonization etc. the knowledge of foreign languages became increasingly important not only to the members of the ruling elite, but also to an emerging middle class. At the same time, heightened nationalism on the one hand and, on the other, the invention of movable type and the resulting spread of literacy to a growing segment of the population drew attention to the native languages of Europe. Across the continent, language academies were founded by scholars, intellectuals and even politicians with the goal of regulating and purifying their national languages. It is interesting that no official academy was created in Germany, but in various cities those concerned with protecting the German language from invasion by foreign words organized language societies, the first was in Weimar in 1617 [10, p. 452], proclaiming the final authority on the national language. But the truth is that despite of great pains taken by purist to avoid foreign borrowings, German, like many other languages of the world, adopted a number of them in its vocabulary and, simultaneously, had supplied a lot of German words into English and other languages: given that both the Austrian psychotherapist Sigmund Freud and his Swiss collaborator Carl Jung were German speakers, it is appropriate that the language has furnished a number of useful terms to describe human psychology and emotions. Among these are angst, Weltanschauung, Weitschmerz and Zeitgeist. German borrowings also include words for a number of concepts for which there is no straightforward English equivalent, such as realpolitik (politics based on practical considerations), Schadenfreude (pleasure from someone's misfortune) and wanderlust (a strong desire to travel) [11, p. 142]. So, contrary to popular belief, the borrowing of German words is still popular in English, that is proved by our research material: in the language distribution 10,6 % of foreign words were borrowed from German in the early 20 century, some of them have not been assimilated and still feel recognizably `German', and we hope that exactly this feature gives them popular acclaim not only in English but in many other languages of the world: gesundheit (used to with good health to a person who has just sneezed), angst (a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general), kletterschuh (a light boot with a cloth worn especially by rock climbing), kitsch (objects or design considered to be in poor taste), etc.

Scientific evidence indicates that in modern lexicological science it is almost axiomatic that not all borrowing is random: words from different semantic domains may differ in their borrowability: lexical items pertaining to the modern world, religion, clothing and grooming, the house, law, social and political relations, agriculture and vegetation, food and drink, and warfare and hunting, are more frequently borrowed than words from the domains of sense perception, spatial relations, body terms, kinship, motion words, the physical world, emotions, and space and time. Within these domains, just as between languages, the overall variation is extensive [4].

German borrowings in English are becoming a popular topic in contemporary lexicology due to the fact that German is pre-eminently the language of the superior ethnonational group (German in Nazi ideology) [12]. Out of all semantic groups, 22 % of words belong to politics and history of Nazi ideology: Drang nach Osten (the German imperialist policy of eastward expansion, especially that espoused under Nazi rule), Reich (the former German state, especially the third Reich (the Nazi regime)), Wandervogel (a member of a German youth organization founded at the end of the 19^th century for the promotion of outdoor activities and folk culture), Anschluss (union, annexation; specifically the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938), kultur (used in the alternative of the Nazi era in a derogatory sense to suggest elements of racism, authoritarism and militarism), etc.

The vocabulary of cooking, food and wine of German origin (17,7 %) should be paid attention to, especially terms that acquired worldwide recognition: Sachertorte (a chocolate gateau with apricot jam filling and chocolate icing; from Franz Sacher, Viennese pastry chef, its creator), stollen (a rich German fruit loaf, often with nuts added), streusel (a crumbly topping or filling made from fat, flour, cinnamon and sugar; a cake or pastry with a streusel topping), bratwurst (a type of mild-flavoured German pork sausage that is fried or grilled), buckling (a smoked herring); names of beverages: Sekt (a German sparkling white wine), Beerenauslese (a white wine of German origin or style made from selected individual grapes picked later than the general harvest), goldwasser (a liqueur containing paricles of gold leaf, originally made in Gdansk in Poland).

The vocabulary of art, literature and music is also rich in German terms (20% in the research material). E20 examples include the following: Sprechtstimme (speech voice), Sprechgesang (a style of dramatic vocalization intermediate between speech and song), Hendentenor (a powerful tenor voice suited to heroic roles, especially in Wagnerian opera), Sezession (a radical art movement that started in Vienna and was contemporaneous with and related to Art Nouveau), Jugendstil (German Art Nouveau, Die Jugend was the name of an influential magazine started in 1896 in Munich), Bauhaus (a German school of architecture and design founded in 1919 by W.Gropius and closed in 1933), Neue Sachlichkeit (a movement in the fine art, music and literature which developed in Germany in the 1920s and was characterized by realism and a deliberate rejection of romantic attitudes) etc.

It is worth mentioning that a number of foreign words of general character enter the English language through German undergoing different degrees of assimilation (22 %): krummholz (stunted windblown trees growing near the treeline on mountains), wanderlust (a strong desire to travel), Sitzfleisch (the ability to persist or endure the activity), loden (a heavy waterproof woolen cloth), etc. It is interesting to point out that German barbarisms in the field of sport enjoy universal acclaim such as zugzwang (chess: a position in which a player must move but cannot do so without disadvantage), Langlauf (cross country skiing; a cross country skiing race) etc.

Some German psychology vocabulary had been mentioned above but several terms (5 %) that became extremely popular in the majority of languages in the world are worth mentioning here: gestalt (an organized whole that is perceived as functionally more than the sum of its parts), Einfuhlung (empathy, from ein-into and Fuhlung-feeling). Words and phrases marked as Br/Am colloquial/slang are available in the experimental material: putz (a fool, a stupid person), Sitzfleisch (a person's buttocks), etc.

It has long been known that languages are more likely to borrow nouns than verbs, and it is not only due to the fact that languages have more nouns than verbs [13, p. 231]. We agree completely with Yaron Matras and Evangelia Adamou [14, p. 1-2] that in the discussion of the impact of language contact on structural change, the question whether structural categories differ in their susceptibility to borrowing and whether constraints can be identified on borrowability has to be addressed, i.e., how word classes react to the pressure of language contact. It has been pointed out that nouns are more easily borrowed than adjectives and that adjectives in turn are more easily borrowed than verbs. Grammatical function words, such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and numerals, are even less likely to be borrowed and behave in that respect much like grammatical inflection. Pronouns and articles do not appear among the list of borrowings. The prevalence of nouns and verbs is connected to vocabulary expansion over a speaker's lifetime (potentially linked to the cultural and technological development of a community) while grammatical items belong to a fixed inventory that is established in early childhood. So, nouns show high borrowability because of their semantic function as designations of new things, the need for affective enrichment or euphemism, the need for differentiation, and a general need for renewal. The prominence of nouns over non-nouns is explained by their relative frequency in the receiving language and so the motivation to borrow nouns must be attributed to the richness of semantic content rather than frequency or the structural properties of nouns as potential stand-alone elements [14, p. 2]. All these has been accurately proved by our experimental material: 86 % of borrowed German words in E20 are nouns, compound nouns in particular: Langlauf, Gotterdammerung, lumpenpoletariat, Wandervogel etc. Examination of the material provides evidence that noun phrases (e.g., Drang nach Osten) occupy the second place in frequency where the leading role in syntax is played by a noun, which most directly identifies the kind of thing to which the phrase refers [15, p. 198-199], so for similar reasons nouns in noun phrases behave this way. Thus, as Matras states [14, p. 5], nouns are prominent borrowings, representing a differentiated inventory of labels for concepts, practices, artefacts, products, human agents, and more. It is the referentiality of nouns rather than their structural features that motivates the borrowing of nouns. `Borrowability' should therefore be considered a direct product of communicative, social and pragmatic motivations to borrow rather than a matter of formal constraint. Languages either treat borrowed nouns like native nouns and integrate them into native inflection patterns, or avoid integration and maintain a simplified representation of borrowed nouns. In some cases, nouns are integrated along with their original inflection from the source language, or else a special integration strategy is applied that marks out borrowed nouns as loans.

Adjectives as a word class whose most characteristic role is as the modifier of a noun - 6,6 % in our research: loden (a dark green colour), verboten (forbidden, especially by an authority), echt (authentic, typical, genuine) etc. Adjectives tend to be integrated syntactically into the position of the attribute in the recipient language, so adjectives often adopt the agreement morphology of the recipient language, thus German ein cooler Type `a cool guy', die coolen Typen `the cool guys'. Integration into the morphology of the host language usually also applies to comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, thus German cooler, am coolsten `cooler, `coolest'. [14, p. 6-7].

It should be emphasized that neither adverbs of German origin, nor verbs have been found in the research, though 4,4 % of interjections were borrowed in E20 of mainly colloquial character: kamerad (expression used by a German speaking soldier notifying to an enemy a wish to surrender; became a cliche of war films), gesundheit (used to wish good health).

Conclusions

On the basis of the study conducted of 424 words, we can state that different languages influence differently the lexicon of English in the early 20 century. The attempt was made to analyze German borrowings as the important supplier of vocabulary into English determining various semantic groups of borrowing due to its frequency (history, military, food and drinks, art and music etc.). Only some of them were presented in a more detailed way, by taking the criterion of loanword numbers. Differentiation into word classes of borrowed words was given and it has been found out that nouns are more borrowable than adjectives or verbs (86%), nouns appear at the top of the list thanks to their contribution to naming objects and concepts, which are key elements of the process of cross-cultural exchange that is inherently involved when languages are in contact. We believe that German presence in the history of England was important, and its impact on the evolution of the language is estimated. It is a very interesting and promising field of investigation and much is expected from the researchers in future. Presented classification of borrowed vocabulary of the early 20^th century performed on the basis of lexicographic investigation and existing theoretical knowledge about German influence on English can serve as an effective foundation for unification of scientific views in the field of English etymology. Up-to-date examples presented in the article will have relevant practical educational implications, providing teachers with opportunities to practice new vocabulary etc. Our future investigations would be concerned with the significance of borrowings from other languages in the word stock of Modern English.

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