A Short History of the German Language (RLE Linguistics E by Chambers William Walker. Wilkie John Ritchie

Author:Chambers, William Walker.,Wilkie, John Ritchie.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

1 Latin words are normally cited in their classical literary forms though they were often borrowed in a Vulgar Latin, i.e. colloquial, form. Similarly words in French, English, and other languages are cited in their modern standard forms.

2 See pp. 14 and 20.

3 See p. 20.

4 See pp. 14,28, 32f.

5 See p. 23 and for details pp. 112ff.

6 This is an example of an explanatory compound, made for the sake of clarity when the first element alone has become unintelligible or ambiguous; other examples are Maultier and Walfisch, cf. the simple mule and whale in English.

7 These must be distinguished from words, such as Bischof and Almosen, whose origin is ultimately Greek but which reached German via Latin (episcopus, eleēmosyna).

8 The other names for days of the week have quite different origins. Sonntag, Montag, Donnerstag, Freitag are loan translations of Sōlis dies, Lūnae dies, Jovis dies, Veneris dies, Jupiter and Venus being replaced by the Germanic Donar (=Thor) and Fria. Dienstag (Martis dies) contains Thinxus, a title given in the Lower Rhine region to Mars as protector of the thing or assembly of the people. Mittwoch is a loan translation of media hebdomas ‘middle (of the) week’. Sonnabend, the northern word for ‘Saturday’, OHG. sunnōn āband, was probably modelled on the Old English sunnan ǣfen, a shortened form of *sunnandæges ǣfen, ‘vigil before Sunday’, used by English missionaries.

9 Writing of a kind, the scratching of (runic) letters on wood or stone, was known to the Germanic people before the monks taught them Latin writing; the verbs used to describe this process were reißen and ritzen (cf. English write). Schreiben implies the writing of connected texts on parchment with a pen. For details of this development see Chapter 4, pp. 27 and 28.

10 Der heilige Geist, like Sonnabend above and gotspel below, is closely modelled on the Old English term used by English missionaries.

11 For the third main period of Latin influence see p. 78.

12 This fashion was still strong enough to be satirized in Meier Helmbreht after 1250.

13 For the normal development of -p-in High German, see p. 112, point (17).

14 Ritter| Reiter and Wappen| Waffe are examples of doublets, i.e. words of different form and meaning which show a common origin. There are many examples in German: Ziegel| Tiegel from Latin tegula; Tisch| Diskus from Lat. discus; Pfalz| Palast| Palais from Lat. palatium, the last two via French in the twelfth and seventeenth centuries respectively.

15 The names of the last two towns, which are now in Poland, have again been given a Slavonic form: Wroclaw, Szczecin.

16 Some Italian loan-words have their origin in Arabic and other oriental languages. No attempt is made to distinguish such words here.

17 Jänner survives in Austria and in south German and Swiss dialects.

18 At the same time the standard language, by ‘internal borrowing’, has drawn many words from regional dialects (Föhn, Gletscher, Rucksack from the Alpine region, Eigenbrötler from Swabia, Eiland, Fliese, Schnurrbart, Schnaps, barsch, stauen from Low German) and from the specialized vocabulary

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.