Broetchen and Handschuh

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

-chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two reasons:

1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last element,
the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers".  E.g. _Bierhefe_ is
'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'.  Though suffixes
determine the syntactic category (and the gender of nouns), it is the root that
expresses/determines the "meaning".  -heit was once a noun, but no more:
_Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), not a kind of free anything.
_Broetchen_ can be compared only to _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_.

2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==>
[bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n].  This never happens in compounds.

If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no
objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least underlying
Handschuhheim) German?  Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but this time I think
he got it right.

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at latte.memphis.edu              University of Memphis