LL-L "Semantics" 2008.06.27 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

=========================================================================
L O W L A N D S - L  - 27 June 2008 - Volume 05
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please set the encoding mode to Unicode (UTF-8).
If viewing this in a web browser, please click on
the html toggle at the bottom of the archived page
and switch your browser's character encoding to Unicode.
=========================================================================

From: Travis Bemann <tabemann at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2008.06.26 (02) [E]

The matter with this is that while the Anglic languages are
genetically very much West Germanic, it seems to in many ways
actuallly areally pattern with North Germanic or the most northern Low
German languages rather than with the rest of West Germanic. A lot of
such is likely just coincidental (or still just fuzzy in the way that
areal phenomena tend to be), but the matter still stands that the
Germanic language that has had the most outside influence upon Anglic
is Old Norse, and the only other Germanic languages with really any
significant influence upon it are the West Germanic dialects spoken
along the southeastern coast of the North Sea (which have themselves
been somewhat influenced by the southernmost North Germanic dialects).

> From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
> Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2008.06.25 (03) [E]
>
> My intuition says that the usage of small and little in English is
> originally from Scandinavian, i.e. Old Norse, Old Danish, Old Norwegian.
>
> In the Scandinavian North Germanic languages the usage of litt etc. and
> små is like in English.
> In the other West Germanic languages (other than English) "smal"
> and "schmal" have a different meaning, in Dutch and German "klein" in the
> word for both little and small.
>
> It looks like the difference between much and many.
> In the Scandinavian languages we see myck etc. and menge etc., whereas
> German has only 'viel' and Dutch 'veel'.
>
> So here too, Scandinavian may have at least encouraged the English usage.
>
> Ingmar
>
> From: Ben J. Bloomgren <ben.j.bloomgren at gmail.com>
> Subject: [LLL] Morphology? Lexicology? Semantics?
>
>  Hei alle sammen (to borrow from another list I'm on [Sorry Reinhard])
>
> Being that I am a linguistics-minded person, I've always wondered about
the
> semantic considerations and origins of the following scenarios:
>
> Two people are walking down a street. One sees that a house finch has been
> injured. This person says:
>
> "Poor little bird(ie)!"
>
> The other says:
>
> "that's quite a blow for such a small bird."
>
> Being that, at least in Norwegian, I've seen evidence of both adjectives
> being present in Germanic languages, what's the origin of the terms small
> and little? Where did we get the semantic differences between the
so-called
> poor, defenseless little ones and the simple size of the small ones?
> Ben

----------

From: Wolfram Antepohl <wolfram at antepohl.se>
Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2008.06.26 (02) [E]

Just a little correction: Liten is used for the singular, små is for the
plural in Swedish - no difference i meaning otherwise (in contrast to
English)
So it's

en liten bil (a/one small car)
(den) lilla bilen (the small car)
små bilar (small cars)
(de) små bilarna (the small cars)

There is even "smal" which is a loan from Low Saxon, meaning "narrow",
"slim"

Hence the same word originally but in two different forms. One north
germanic, the other a Low Saxon loan - quite a usual phenomenon in the
Scandinavian languages.

Greetings

Wolfram Antepohl

Wolfram Antepohl
Lindesbergsgatan 4
582 53 Linköping
013-125243
073-6002667
wolfram at antepohl.se

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com
Subject: Semantics

Hi, Wolfram!

It's great you joined us in the speakers' corner. Welcome!

Reinhard/Ron
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20080627/e5788472/attachment.htm>