Broetchen and Handschuh

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

>From:	IN%"Indo-European at xkl.com" 20-APR-1999 22:48:05.09
>Subj:	RE: Broetchen and Handschuh

>On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

>> -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.

>I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there
>is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I
>think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be
>compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe.  Just as Bierhefe means
>'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of
>being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English
>motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc.  So these old
>compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's
>just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been
>grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost
>from the language.

My choice of _Freiheit_ as an example was not good, for many of the reasons you
pointed out.  Semantics aside, I still believe that _Freiheit_ and _freedom_
are not compounds, if only because they do not have the stress and intonation
pattern of compounds. (This is more obvious in the English example.)  That they
once *were* compounds is, of course, undeniable.

But I should point out that compounds do not normally have a "genitive + noun"
format, as you said.  Synchronically, genitive-like -s- is very rare in
English, while in German it is particularly common on *feminine* first
elements, which precisely do *not* have -s in the genitive case: formations
such as _Universitaet-s-praesident_ do not contain a genitive formant.  No a
surprise, really; the PIE type used the *stem* of the first element, with no
case ending.

>> 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.

>Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right.  You
>originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen
>Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check,
>I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic
>*_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung."
>But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die
>oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh"
>umgedeutet, ist verfehlt."  So while differences of opinion make for
>book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the
>moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'.

The latest edition of Kluge has changed much, mainly for  the best, it seems.
But then the personal names must be mere coincidence, and _Handschuhheim_ folk
etymology?

>Bob Whiting
>whiting at cc.helsinki.fi

Leo

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