[Corpora-List] foreign words in German

[chris brew]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Alon Lischinsky
<alon.lischinsky at kultmed.umu.se> wrote:
> 2011/9/28 chris brew <cbrew at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> This notion of "foreign word" is absolutely not sustainable.
>
> I think a better (more testable) way to put it is that 'foreignness'
> is not categorical but scalar, and that the ranking judgements of
> native speakers are likely to be inconsistent, as well as often
> unrelated to etymological origin.

I don't think it is even scalar. If it were scalar (i.e. like a
number), you could be sure of forming an total order defined by the
notion
MORE_FOREIGN_THAN. If, as I suspect, you are saying that rankings may
be inconsistent even within a single speaker, then that would
suggest that the speaker has a richer representation than a single
number associated with a notion of 'foreignness".

I would be happier saying that judgments of word origin are
multidimensional. That makes your notion of clustering is a good idea,
because clustering is possible even when ranking is not.
Multidimensional objects are tough to rank unless they have special
mathematical properties.

The kind of evidence I would produce for multidimensionality is the
fact that German speakers typically know something about the
pronunciation of words like Beton and Karton even if they are not
aware of the reason for it. The -on spelling is pronounced with either
an engma or a genuine French-style nasalized vowel. In neither case is
the word a good fit for how most German words sound. People know what
to do, and that the words are pronounced in a foreign way, even
if they don't know that they are borrowings from French. Other, more
sophisticated, speakers may know about the French origin and make
measurably different pronunciation choices.

Fully agree that people don't necessarily know much about real
etymology, but still have awareness of something about word origins.


>
> On the other hand, it may well be that the history of German allows
> one to identify cohorts of words borrowed largely at the same time,
> and having experienced a similar amount of adaptation, so that some
> definite clusters can be appreciated within the cline running from the
> fully native (e.g., 'Weg') and the recently borrowed (e.g., 'Quiz'). I
> don't know enough about German to check if that's reasonable, though.
>
> A.
>
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-- 
Chris Brew, Educational Testing Service

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