LL-L 'Etymology' 2006.07.29 (01) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 29 July 2006 * Volume 01
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From: 'jonny'
Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2006.07.26 (02) [D/E]

Dear Ron,

you wrote:

> Jonny, I wonder if this _Feller_ is an English loan reaching certain Low
> Saxon communities via sailors' jargon.

Yes- these thoughts were mine, too. Meanwhile I for myself investigated the
possibilities of any English influence and could exclude TV or something of this
kind. But--- after WWII for some years we had English soldiers in our region, and
(besides your sailors) these contacts indeed could have caused a 'friendly
take-over' of E: 'fellow'. This perhaps could explain the fact that the word is
used so rarely.

Thanks for your doubting answer!

Greutens/Regards

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm

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From: R. F. Hahn
Subject: Etymology

Thanks, Jonny. That's an interesting theory, definitely worth considering.

Well, what I had in mind was actually something older than that, going back to
the days when crews on those old sailing vessels tended to be ethnically and
linguistically mixed and especially English terms were taken home by North German
sailors. Note that those terms tend to be geographically and socially limited too.

For instance in the area in and around Hamburg we use words such as _törn_
(_Törn_) '(brief) (round) trip' (< "turn"), _kru_ (_Kru_) 'crew' (< "crew"),
_bak_ (_back_) 'back(ward)' (< "back"). (_Bak_ is of course also Scandinavian.)

My favorite theory is that these belonged to a type of jargon (in the sense of
"specialized terminology"), therefore never made it into many other dialects and
thus the language as a whole. Furthermore, some of them may have been merely
fashionable at one time or other and may not have survived in some dialects. And
here could lie a complicating factor in that they may have disappeared from the
donor dialects but survived in a few recipient dialects, especially dialects that
are more conservative. I trust you get my meaning. In short, if there is a
history of passing on terms from dialect to dialect, today's remnants are likely
to skew the picture, obscuring the place of entry and route of migration of
loanwords. In languages such as Low Saxon this is much harder to trace back due
to relative scarcity of written sources in a given dialect.

The English world "fellow" (> "feller" ~ "fella") is old, originally had the
meaning of 'companion', soon also the meaning of 'mate' (in the sense of both
'one of a couple' and 'one of a pair' > 'one of a group'). (In many British
dialects it also came to be used in the sense of "boyfriend.") From what I have
gathered from 18th- and 19th-century English texts, this word used to be used far
more then than it is now. In fact, not only did it have a tendency toward being
used much like today's "guy" but it seems to have been used in some speech mode
also in the sense of "guy" as in Modern American English "funny" style for
something like "one." (Let's say I give someone instructions for putting
together a premanufactured shelving unit I might say something like, "OK, first
you put these guys on the top and bottom, then this guy in the middle, and the
others in between.") Sailors and soldiers took this usage of "fellow" with them
to the colonies where it entered as _fela_ or _pela_ into the emerging pidgin
languages (some of which became creoles). For instance, in Tok Pisin
(Neo-Melanesian) of Papua New Guinea _pela_ has evolved into a general nominal
marker, also into a pronomical plural marker, as for instance _Dispela taim
mipela laik baim bikpela haus antap long dispela grinpela maunten_ (=
"this-fellow time me-fellow like buy-him big-fellow haus on-top this/that-fellow
green-fellow mountain") 'At that time we wanted to buy a/the large house on
this/that green hill'.

At any rate, I do find the occurrence of _Feller_ in Low Saxon very interesting.

Kumpelmenten,
Reinhard/Ron

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