[Corpora-List] foreign words in German

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2011/9/29 Anne Schumann <anne.schumann at tilde.lv> wrote:

> First of all, I don't see a reason why one should resort to a source of evidence
> as intractable as "speakers' knowledge about language". Are we talking about
> "ideal speakers" here or what would be a representative "corpus" of speakers?

I don't think I ever mentioned speakers' knowledge as a source of
evidence. However intractable it may be in that regard, it is
nevertheless the real-world object that a theory of word foreignness
should model, and important in that regard. (As long as one is
interested in modeling real-world language, that is.)

> Moreover, I think that linguists tend to forget that most people don't care
> for language and know even less about it in terms of theory

There is ample evidence showing that people care for language (the
Milroy's 'The Complaint Tradition' and Cameron's 'Verbal Hygiene' are
well-known discussions of the topic). On the other hand, it is true
that the average citizen knows little about linguistic theory (which
was pretty much my and Bill's point in the preceding discussion). This
shouldn't mean that lay ideas about language can be simply ignored;
language change certainly does not happen in the way the average
citizen thinks, but it happens because of processes that take place
*because* of how the average citizen thinks. To take the obvious
example, from a linguistic point of view is meaningless to speak of a
dialect being 'better' or 'more elegant' than another, but it's
speakers lay judgements about such things that motivate
sociolinguistic accommodation.

> Spelling, however, is a linguistic category and we don't need huge surveys to detect strange spelling.

Probably not in German. I doubt that'd be the case in English or French.

> Last but not least, a fun question on "Boot/boat": If we talk about Proto-Germanics living in a Proto-Germanic territory,
> can we really call this a "borrowing from English to German"? Did "German" or "English" exist back then?

Certainly by the time it first appeared in German. 'Boot' is first
documented in the 15th century, and its form shows clearly that it's a
Low German or Dutch borrowing. Those languages in turn borrowed it
from Old English (either directly or via Old Norse), which provides
the only original attestation for a reconstructed proto-Germanic
'*baitaz'. If the word had developed independently in German, regular
sound changes would dictate a form '*Beiẞ'.

> Besides that, fork/Forke may also be proto-Germanic.

Not according to any source I know of.

A.

_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora