[Corpora-List] foreign words in German

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2011/9/28 chris brew <cbrew at acm.org> wrote:

> 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".

Well, that's true, but I don't think any theoretical representations
are as rich as speakers' internalised ones. We have yet to
parsimoniously model the reason why 'strong' goes with 'coffee' and
'powerful' with 'engine'. A scalar metric of 'foreignness' would be
more accurate (and probably more useful) than a categorical division,
even if it failed to capture all the nuances, and probably more useful
(at least for some tasks) than sticking with a fully multidimensional
representation. (In any case, these should be empirically resolvable
questions.)

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

In the case of recent borrowings (especially those that haven't
undergone spelling adaptation), this is probably the case. I have yet
to find an English speaker (without a specialised degree) that could
tell that 'school', 'fork' or 'castle' are Latinate, or that 'ticket'
and 'toast' are French in origin, though.


@Mike Maxwell:

> 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.

I think they probably would. I also think most native speakers would
consider 'ticket', 'mess', 'blue' or 'mail' to belong to the same
stratum, which again makes a categorical distinction of little use.

A.

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