27.362, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling: Fiedler (2014)

Tue Jan 19 21:02:42 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-362. Tue Jan 19 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.362, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling: Fiedler (2014)

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Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:02:24
From: Cornelia Tschichold [C.Tschichold at swansea.ac.uk]
Subject: Gläserne Decke und Elefant im Raum

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-708.html

AUTHOR: Sabine  Fiedler
TITLE: Gläserne Decke und Elefant im Raum
SUBTITLE: Phraseologische Anglizismen im Deutschen
PUBLISHER: ISD, Distributor of Scholarly Books
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Cornelia I. Tschichold, Swansea University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This study aims to record the contemporary use of new phrases that have
entered the German language from English over the last two decades. German has
extensive contact with English and a large percentage of its neologisms are
loanwords from English. Loan translations of English expressions are less
conspicuous than loanwords and are less often recorded in dictionaries. The
objects of study are phraseological in English, but they can be simple
compounds in German, e.g. the English expression “rule of thumb” has a German
loan translation “Daumenregel”, a compound written as a single orthographic
word. (The best translation of “rule of thumb” into German is “Faustregel” –
“rule of fist”, not the recent loan translation.) Most of the expressions
discussed, however, are also phraseologisms in German, i.e. they consist of
more than one orthographic word. Phraseologisms are lexicalized expressions of
more than one word. They can be idiomatic and often have distinct
connotations. Fiedler assumes that the latter can be one of the reasons for
borrowing the expression, and that cultural aspects generally play a more
important role for phraseological borrowings than for borrowings of single
words.

Before looking in more detail at a series of borrowed expressions, the author
gives an overview of the extent of borrowing from English found in German.
Sports, the advertising industry, and computing are areas where borrowings
from English are common today, but there is also a long history of borrowings
from English, even including the period when East Germany was communist and
speakers of that variety of German did not have extensive contact with
English-speaking countries. Borrowings can be found at all levels of
linguistics. Some pronunciations and orthographic conventions, such as the use
of apostrophes and hyphens, have also found their way into some varieties of
German, a language where compounds are traditionally written as single words
without spaces or hyphens, and where the apostrophe has a much more restricted
use than in English. Semantically, some German words have acquired further
senses that have their origin in their English cognate. On the level of
syntax, a few English constructions can now be found with increasing frequency
in German, e.g. ‘in (year)’ rather than simply the year without any
preposition. Pragmatic borrowing can be found in new genres in TV or the way
academic texts are structured.

On the background of this extensive evidence of contact phenomena, Fiedler
then describes a number of corpus studies of individual expressions in detail;
a few samples of which are given here. The largest group among the
phraseological anglicisms are loan translations. A successful example of these
is the English “golden handshake” translated into German as “goldener
Handschlag”. As there was no German expression denoting this type of payment,
it seems to have been successfully lexicalized in German. A less successful
example is “a smoking gun”, which can be translated either as “rauchende
Waffe” or “rauchende Pistole”. While the German press used the loan
translation a number of times around the time of the Iraq war, it seems to
have fallen out of use since without ever reaching the stage of being fully
lexicalized in German. Some expressions have their origin in the Bible, but
have only recently become common in German via their English equivalents, e.g.
“the writing on the wall” – “die Schrift an der Wand”, or “the fly in the
ointment” – “die Fliege in der Salbe”. Other expressions become common in a
specific genre and spread from there, e.g. “Es ist keine Raketenwissenschaft”
(“It’s not rocket science”), which apparently is very popular on advice pages,
or “der Elefant im Raum/Zimmer” (“the elephant in the room”), which is now
being used without further explanation, but still occurs in the two variants
with one of the two different translations of the word “room”. Fully
lexicalized expressions typically have one canonical form only, and do not
need any explanations as to their origin. Then there are the multi-word
lexemes that have a perfectly grammatical literal equivalent in German and
have recently acquired a more idiomatic loan translation from English, such as
“einen Unterschied machen” (“to make a difference”) and “einen Punkt machen”
(“to make a point”), which can mean ‘to stop’ in addition to the literal
sense, but is now acquiring the English sense ‘to point out’ in addition to
the original German ones. Another noteworthy example is “jemandem den Tag
retten”, which can be found in the corpora as a translation of either “to make
someone’s day” or also “to save the day”. This will be an interesting
expression to watch over the coming years, to see whether it becomes
lexicalized in German, and if so, in what sense exactly.

Fiedler concludes that English has a pervasive influence on the German
language, not just through conventional (single) loanwords, but also for
borrowings in the area of phraseology. The evidence points to bilingual
speakers easing the passage of English multi-word expressions in the initial
stages when variation is still common. At this stage, English and German
versions may compete, e.g. “glass ceiling” – “gläserne Decke” (adjective-noun
collocation) – “Glasdecke” (noun-noun compound). Some expressions then remain
in English, but the majority are translated, some only partially, which again
of course can cause variation. Only when the amount of variation decreases can
we speak of the lexicalization of an expression. Once an expression has
properly taken hold and is familiar enough in the community, speakers can
start to introduce playful variation, a phenomenon which is frequent in
advertising contexts and where many speakers are more tolerant of borrowings
than in other areas of language use. Fiedler’s book provides a number of
interesting examples from this area.

EVALUATION

As a German-English bilingual living in an English-speaking country, I found
this book a really interesting read. As a linguist, I had noticed the odd
expression that sounded like a loan translation to me, but because I am not a
Germanist and do not know very much about German corpora, I did not follow up
on any of these. Fiedler’s book at once confirmed and vastly expanded on my
impression that there is a strong and long-lasting influence of English on
German, particularly in the area of phraseology. Since reading the book, I
have noticed such expressions even more frequently, of course. Most of the
German I am in contact with is from Switzerland, and – thanks to podcasting –
often in the form of radio shows. Journalists, especially those working on
technology and computer-related topics, use the phrases discussed in this book
and a number of other loan translations as well.

Fiedler suggests that cultural reasons play a more important part in the
borrowing of expressions compared to single words, and she illustrates this in
many of her examples. While this is informative for each individual expression
concerned, it would have been even more interesting to see whether this is a
trend that can be generalized and possibly attributed to the fact that
multi-word expressions rather than single words are the focus, or whether it
is more of a coincidence. Perhaps parallel corpora of translated texts would
make an interesting comparison to the corpora used for the present study.

Given my background, I am probably not part of the main intended readership of
this book. Students and researchers of (German) phraseology will undoubtedly
read this study with great interest, but apart from this group of people, the
book can also be recommended for anyone with an interest in recent
developments in the German language as it is written in a very accessible
style that does not require much linguistic background to enjoy it. Students
of corpus linguistics and of contact linguistics can draw inspiration from it
to explore other expressions they suspect may be loan translations on the
ascent in contemporary German.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Cornelia Tschichold wrote her PhD on the treatment of English phraseology in a
computational lexicon. Originally from German-speaking Switzerland, she now
works at Swansea University (Wales), where she teaches various courses in
Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include the acquisition of English
vocabulary and phraseology, and computer-assisted language learning

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