[Corpora-List] foreign words in German

[maxwell]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:10:55 -0400, chris brew <cbrew at acm.org> wrote:
> This is all ridiculously hard. There are not many words in any
> language which are solidly native.

I can think of one language--Waorani (Auca), of Ecuador--which had nothing
*but* native words until the mid-1960s.  That's right, not one identifiable
loan word.  Unfortunately, most of us aren't doing annotation in Wao...

As for English (and other languages that most of us work in), another way
to look at the problem is the etymology, which is pretty well documented in
dictionaries.  There are occasional disagreements or unclear cases, but for
the most part it's well known.  So if you allow access to dictionaries, it
should be possible to tell.  Of course, native speakers don't have access
to etymologies (apart from looking them up in dictionaries).  It's often
assumed, nevertheless, that native speakers do have some knowledge of the
lexical "strata" that words come from, and that this knowledge is used e.g.
in deciding whether it's possible to attach certain derivational suffixes
(in English, -ion goes on Latinate words).  These strata are noticeably
fuzzy, but I would guess that there are words that are pretty clearly in
one stratum or another.  'House', 'dog', 'run', 'stone', 'walk', 'think'
are all pretty clearly native roots in English, I would think, and I would
expect most native speakers to agree to that.

There's a Douglas Hofstedter story that uses Germanic vocabulary: in Le
Ton beau de Marot, p. 302, and on-line at
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/einstein.html.

   Mike Maxwell

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