28.4379, Review: English; German; Lexicography; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Schultz (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4379. Mon Oct 23 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4379, Review:  	English; German; Lexicography; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Schultz (2016)

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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 13:49:52
From: Caterina Saracco [caterina.saracco at unibg.it]
Subject: Twentieth-Century Borrowings from German to English

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-5166.html

AUTHOR: Julia  Schultz
TITLE: Twentieth-Century Borrowings from German to English
SUBTITLE: Their Semantic Integration and Contextual Usage
SERIES TITLE: Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Caterina Saracco, (MIUR) Ministero dell'Istruzione Università e Ricerca

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Twentieth Century Borrowings from German to English” is a new book of Julia
Schultz, recently published by Peter Lang in the series Duisburg Papers on
Research in Language and Culture.
After a list of abbreviations and symbols, the work is organized into three
chapters of different lengths and an appendix with the list of German
borrowings appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and in the EFL
dictionaries (English as a Foreign Language dictionaries). In these chapters
Schultz wants to investigate the deep influence of German language on the
English vocabulary in the 20th century and to examine which areas of English
lexical life were enriched by German. Using the Oxford English Dictionary and
other dictionaries and corpora available online or in electronic form, Schulz
outlines the semantic development and the contextual usage of the German
borrowings in the present day English of the last century.

Chapter One, the introduction, is divided into two main parts. The first one
focuses on the several previous studies about German influence on English in
the 20th century and shows how they were not exhaustive: many of them
concentrated actually on describing lexical borrowings only in “core areas” of
English; other works instead were only informative and provided essential
insights into the influence of German on English. Some studies focused on the
phonological and orthographical assimilation of German borrowings in American
English; other papers wanted to describe borrowings using as source of
investigation only in magazines and newspapers. Because of this situation, it
is evident how a more up to date, comprehensive and adequate investigation and
treatment of the 20th century German borrowings to the English language is
needed. 

The second part of Chapter On is devoted to remark the aims of Schultz’
investigation: researching the semantic development of the German borrowings
into English and “provid[ing] an overview of the overall chronological
distribution of German borrowings [… and] also a detailed analysis of the
temporal dimension of the borrowing process in each subject area” (p. 24). In
section 2.3 the author describes the methodology and the several lexical
sources she needed, like Duden Online or digitalized corpora like LexisNexis.
The last section of this first Chapter contains an explanation of the
terminology employed in Schultz’ study. This part is divided into five
subsections: 1) a look at the definition of ‘word’, ‘lexical item’, ‘term’ and
‘meaning’; 2) an illustration of the different forms of semantic change as in
Ullmann (1967) (broadening, narrowing, metonymy, metaphor, amelioration,
pejoration, providing an example for each type of change); 3) types of
stylistics functions. Having as frame of reference the studies by Galinsky
(1964, 1975) and Pfitzner (1978), the author gives much importance to the
pragmatic contextual usage of words and discusses the stylistic dimension of
borrowings as pointed out by the linguistic evidence. As a matter of fact, a
borrowing may be used for creating local color, for the sake of precision, to
heighten the vividness of speech, to permit the writer or the speaker to
create a particular tone in several relevant contexts or for a normal
variation of style (as an alternative expression to avoid repetitions). 4)
Schultz discusses also the different categories of lexical borrowing, using
the classification of Carstensen (1968), which reports the main basic ones:
‘direct loan’, ‘foreign word’ / ‘loanword’ / ‘exoticism’, ‘adaptation’, ‘loan
translation’, ‘loan rendition’, ‘loan creation’, ‘semantic loan’, ‘hybrid’,
‘pseudo-loan’, ‘double and multiple loans’, ‘back borrowing’. Finally, in 5)
the author explains the various grammatical terms she used in her study, like
‘phrase’ and ‘premodification’.

Chapter Two, the core of the study, is devoted to the analysis of the German
borrowings that were adopted into English in the last century (1958 lexical
items). The total number of words is grouped in nine macro-categories
according to their meaning, categories that are labeled by Schultz “areas and
spheres of life” (p. 47): ‛Culture and History’ (28 terms), ‛Leisure and
Pleasure’ (31 terms), ‛Technology’ (54 terms), ‛Gastronomy’ (67 terms), ‛Fine
Arts and Crafts’ (76 borrowings), ‛People and Everyday Life’ (92 words and
meanings), ‛Mathematics and the Humanities’ (127 borrowings), ‛Civilization
and Politics’ (162 terms), ‛Natural Sciences’ (1307 borrowings). The tenth
group is called ‛Miscellaneous’, because it contains fourteen lexical items,
which cannot be listed clearly in a particular sphere of human life. The
borrowings that have been assigned to every category are German words or words
from different varieties of German, but also terms with a mixed etymology
(from German and from another language).

Every category presents various subcategories. ‛Culture and History’, which
comprises 28 words, is divided for example into four subareas: ‛culturology
and cultural history’, ‛Africa’, ‛archeology’ and ‛anthropology’. For every
borrowing the author specifies the lexical class (e.g. Gastronomy, cookery,
nouns: ‘muesli’) or if it is a noun phrase (e.g. Mathematics and the
Humanities, language and linguistics, phrases, noun phrases: ‘Wörter und
Sachen’) and also if the borrowing reflects a German proper noun in English
(e.g. Natural Sciences, medicine, immunology, nouns, borrowings reflecting a
proper noun: ‘Prausnitz-Küstner’; name of an immunological test from the
proper names Carl Willy Prausnitz and Heinz Küstner, bacteriologists). As
promised by the author in the introduction, for every term Schulz outlines the
semantic development and the contextual usage of German borrowings in present
day English and the stylistic function they have in English texts. For
example, in page 101 the author speaks about the adjectival borrowing
‘malerisch’ in English; it is a term pertaining to the painting lexicon, for
which OED gives the following definition: “relating to a manner of painting
characterized more by the merging of colors than by the more formal linear
style; painterly”. The meaning of this term is very near to “picturesque” and
its use is more specific in English than in German language (in Duden On-line
‘malerisch’ is something “typisch für die Malerei”, typical of painting). 

In the third and last Chapter Schultz gives an extensive and detailed summary
of her work and draws some interesting conclusions. First of all, the author
states that she has identified several types of lexical borrowing in her
study: most of them are adaptations and loan translations, but there are also
a considerable number of direct loans among German derived words and semantic
loans. In the minority are loan renditions, loan creations, pseudo-loans and
back-borrowings. Subsequently, the conclusions are divided into four
sub-sections: 1) about the chronological distribution of the twentieth century
German borrowings in English; 2) their semantic analysis; 3) their pragmatic /
contextual use and their stylistic function; 4) the status of German today in
contrast to English.

About the chronological distribution of borrowings it is extremely interesting
to note that the great majority of them entered English during the first forty
years of the 20th century (1538 out of 1958), whilst in the decades 2000-2009
and 2010-2015 no German lexical items have been borrowed into the  English
language. With the help of a graphic and a numeric overview, Schultz (pp.
284-287) gives us numbers and percentages of German borrowings in the various
categories and their subgroups: ‘Natural Science’ is the sphere on which
German influence was the most intense (in particular medicine and chemistry),
then the second category is ‘Civilization and Politics’ and the third one is
‘Mathematics and the Humanities’. For each of the sub-areas the author
specifies also the decade during which German made essential lexical
contributions. In regard to the core vocabulary, it is found that only 121
lexical items belong  to the basic lexicon of EFL dictionaries; but also in
this case the category ‛Natural Science’ is the most receptive one (56
borrowings), followed by ‛Civilization and Politics’ and ‛People and Everyday
Life’. Examples of the most frequent German words in the sphere of medicine
can be ‘histamine’ and ‘chemotherapy’, from politics ‘putsch’ and
‘blitzkrieg’, about the everyday life we can quote ‘bratwurst’ and ‘muesli’. 
Two other facts that Schultz wants to underline are that the temporal
distribution of the lexical items which are part of the core vocabulary is
different from that of the entire body of German borrowings (p. 293), and that
“32 areas and spheres of life lack any borrowing that is part of the core
vocabulary” (ibidem). For example a central category of the human life in the
20th century, ‛Transport and Travelling’, has no words or meanings that can be
considered as borrowed from German. About the semantic analysis of borrowings
the author points out that several lexical items which entered English have
the same meaning of their equivalent in the donor language (such as
‘blitzkrieg’), whilst a considerable number of words have a quite different
meaning because of a process of broadening or narrowing. The term ‘mutant’,
which reflects the German word ‘Mutant’, shows in English a sense which is
unknown to the German language: from being a biological term for animals or
genes which were subjected to a mutation process, it is now used in  American
slang to denote a person with antisocial or sociopathic tendencies. Another
peculiarity, which Schultz’ work highlights, is that not only words denoting
abstract things or concepts underwent a semantic change, but also personal
names or designations for animals had a semantic development; names of
institutions, organizations or products do not generally show  shifts in
meaning. In the third section of this last chapter the author wants to give to
the reader a summary of the more complete description of the pragmatic and
contextual use and the stylistic functions of the German borrowings in English
she discussed in the second chapter. In her corpus the author has found
examples for every stylistic function listed in the first chapter (local
color, precision, tone, vividness and variation of expression). Without
entering the details, we can mention only some of the terms Schultz quotes:
‘zugtrompete’ (a slide trumpet) is a borrowing from German which was needed to
fill a semantic gap in English because of the lack a concise equivalent
(precision); ‘Rottweiler’, which designated a type of dog originally, now has
a different meaning in English, because it denotes an aggressive person by
metaphor (vividness). The very conclusion of the book is the section where
Schultz makes comments on the present status of German in contrast to English.
Since she noted in her work that no more borrowings have entered English from
German language since year 1992, she tries to explain why German is no longer
a donor language. The various hypotheses she produces are historical and
cultural: during the last fifty years the English language and the American
variant have replaced German and French as the lingua franca in Europe; also
she notes the impact of the American culture, business and technical knowledge
(see Busse & Görlach 2004: 14). Schultz underlines also the fact that the
teaching of German as foreign language has been greatly reduced in England and
that generally the interest of the English population in the German culture
(and language) is not as vivid as before. This could lead to a decrease of
German borrowings in English in recent times.

EVALUATION

This book of Julia Schultz fills a gap in English lexicology. The huge amount
of data she collected from OED, EFL dictionaries and several other electronic
databases allows her  to provide an exhaustive look and a precise analysis of
German borrowings into English during the 20th century. Her study is well
done, readable and accurate, especially the description of the semantic change
and the change of context of a word from German to English: she traces the
sources of German lexical items and describes precisely the context in which
these words are used in the recipient language. Overlooking the technical
aspects of this study, I want to focus on some results which are relevant not
only for lexicography and lexicology, but also for the history of the German
and English language. The overview of the chronological distribution of 20th
century German borrowings in English is absolutely new; for every decade
Schultz specifies the area(s) and sphere(s) of life in which borrowings are
present and their percentage. This investigation permits her to determine also
how German culture influenced the English world.
This work provides the first comprehensive research on the semantic
integration of German borrowings into English and demonstrates that the former
had a huge impact on the lexicon of the latter especially in the first forty
years of the 20th century, although today it is common to emphasize only the
influx of Anglicisms into German.

REFERENCES 

Busse, Ulrich & Manfred Görlach. 2002. German. In Manfred Görlach (ed.),
English in Europe, 13-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carstensen, Broder. 1968. Zur Systematik und Terminologie deutsch-englisher
Lehnbeziehungen. In Herbert E. Brekle & Leonhard Lipka (eds.), Wortbildung,
Syntax und Morphologie. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Hans Marchand am 1.
Oktober 1967, 87-105. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.

Galinsky, Hans. 1964. Stylistic aspects of linguistic borrowing. A stylistic
and comparative view of American elements in Modern German and British
English. In Horace G. Lunt (ed.), Proceedings of the 9th International
Congress of Linguists, 374-381. The Hague: Mouton.

Galinsky, Hans. 1977. Amerikanisch-englische und gesamtenglische Interferenzen
mit dem Deutschen und anderen Sprachen der Gegenwart. In Herbert Kolb &
Hartmut Lauffer (eds.), Sprachliche Interferenz, 463-517. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Pfitzner, Jürgen. 1978. Der Anglizismus im Deutschen: ein Betrag zur
Bestimmung seiner stilistischen Funktion in der heutigen Presse. Stuttgart:
Metzler.

Ullmann, Stephen. 1967. The Principles of Semantics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a Ph.D student of the University of Pavia. My doctoral dissertation will
be about the Semantics and Morphosyntax of bahuvrihi compounds in West and
East Old Germanic Languages, using a Cognitive Linguistics framework
(supervisor Prof. Silvia Luraghi). <br /><br />Now I am a teaching assistant
at the University of Pavia (Historical Linguistics, History of German Language
and Cognitive Linguistics) and I work on valency classes of Gothic language in
the project ''Transitivity and Argument Structure in Flux''. This project is
funded by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research (MIUR) in the
framework of the 2015 PRIN.<br /><br />My research interests are Old Saxon
morphology, Gothic syntax and morphology, Germanic Bahuvrihi compounds,
Cognitive Linguistics applied to Old Germanic languages.





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