Broetchen and Handschuh

[Robert Whiting]

On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

> -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two
> reasons:

> 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last
> element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers".  E.g.
> _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'.
> Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of
> nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning".  -heit
> was once a noun, but no more:  _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'),
> not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to
> _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_.

> 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==>
> [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n].  This never happens in compounds.

I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there
is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I
think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be
compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe.  Just as Bierhefe means
'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of
being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English
motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc.  So these old
compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's
just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been
grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost
from the language.

> If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no
> objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least
> underlying Handschuhheim) German?  Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but
> this time I think he got it right.

Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right.  You
originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen
Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check,
I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic
*_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung."
But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die
oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh"
umgedeutet, ist verfehlt."  So while differences of opinion make for
book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the
moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi