re- [Danish]

[Paul J Hopper]

To which should be added that Holberg was much influenced by French
classical comedy, especially Moliere. If he introduced the word into
Danish with this meaning, he could very well have had the French revenant
in mind.
- Paul


On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Hartmut Haberland wrote:

> Stefan Knoob wrote:
>
> > German has "Wiedergänger", although that is quite archaic, I seem to
> > remember it from 19th century novels. Don't know about the Danish, but in
> > German it does not simply mean "ghost" but that specific kind of ghost
> > of a
> > lost soul that comes to haunt the living.
> > I don't know how old and widespread it is, but it seems to me that the
> > whole
> > concept is found in discourses about the supernatural across European
> > cultures, and was probably in fashion during the Romantic period's
> > preoccupation with the spooky.
>
> Well, ODS (Ordbog over det danske sprog), the authoritative Danish
> historical dictionary, claims that genganger is Early Modern Danish
> (ældre nydansk, 1500-1700), and the first item attested in the
> dictionary is from Holberg's Peder Paars (1719-20). Certainly
> pre-romanticism!
> The Grimms' Wörterbuch (for German) is not quite as clear on this point
> here, but all of the examples attested in it (both for Wi(e)dergänger
> and the verb wi(e)dergehen) are from C19 or even later. They also seem
> to point towards Northern dialects (also wäärgan, wergân: East Frisian
> forms of wi(e)dergehen).
>
>
> > Would be interesting where it actually comes
> > from: although a spread from French literature to Danish/German seems
> > certainly more likely than the other way round, given the literature
> > dissemination patterns throughout the early modern period, it might
> > actually
> > originate in another European language.
>
>
> The assumption that spread always goes from bigger to smaller languages
> has a certain plausibility, since bilingualism often is more widespread
> among speakers of smaller languages, so they read/hear more of big
> languages than vice versa.. But it also works the other way round: since
> speakers of smaller languages use bigger languages actively
> (write/speak) more often than vice versa, they have more of a chance to
> influence the bigger languages. (That this second route of spread often
> is neglected,  is probably a sort of secondary effect of Chomskyan
> nativespeakerism: production by nonnatives is assumed to be faulty and
> stigmatized by definition, hence negligeable as a source of language
> spread.)
>
> And of course, it is all not just quantitative, cf. my non-quantitative
> definition of  'small language' as 'language rarely or practically never
> used as a lingua franca'.
>
> Hartmut Haberland
>
> >
> >> From: Paul J Hopper <ph1u at ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
> >> Reply-To: Paul J Hopper <ph1u at ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
> >> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> >> Subject: Re: re- [Danish]
> >> Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 11:47:15 -0400
> >>
> >> I've often wondered if the "ghost" meaning of Danish genganger is a
> >> calque
> >> on the French revenant. Just curious.
> >>
> >> Paul
> >>
> >>
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Hotmail messages direct to your mobile phone
> > http://www.msn.co.uk/msnmobile
> >
>
>
>