Etymological spectrum
An etymological spectrum (English etymological spectrum ) is an overview of where - from which languages - the words of a certain language come from.
The etymological spectrum of German
In her investigation of Kluge's etymological dictionary, Katharina Ternes processed all entries for which information could be found as to the century in which they appeared in German, a total of 11,144 keywords, including 5,434 borrowings ( foreign and loan words ). Your details are listed in the table below. In addition, it was investigated whether a mathematical model can be found that the observed data follow, in accordance with the basic assumption of quantitative linguistics that linguistic processes and structures are controlled by laws. In accordance with studies that have already been carried out, a model is being tested that Altmann developed for any hierarchy:
The following table contains only those languages from which, according to Kluge, at least three loans originate; For the calculations, however, all languages of origin were taken into account, including the percentages. The etymological spectrum (here: foreign word spectrum ) of German is as follows:
| rank | Language of origin | Number of words | relative share | calculation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Latin | 2051 | 37.74 | 2051.00 |
| 2 | French | 1381 | 25.41 | 1236.30 |
| 3 | Low German | 558 | 10.27 | 753.19 |
| 4th | English | 513 | 9.44 | 463.57 |
| 5 | Italian | 317 | 5.83 | 288.13 |
| 6th | Greek | 179 | 3.29 | 180.77 |
| 7th | Dutch | 139 | 2.26 | 114.44 |
| 8th | Rotwelsch | 66 | 1.21 | 73.08 |
| 9 | Spanish | 51 | 0.94 | 47.06 |
| 10 | Yiddish | 25th | 0.46 | 30.55 |
| 11 | Russian | 19th | 0.35 | 19.98 |
| 12 | Czech | 14th | 0.26 | 13.17 |
| 13 | Old Norse | 11 | 0.20 | 8.74 |
| 14th | Polish | 11 | 0.20 | 5.85 |
| 15th | Turkish | 9 | 0.17 | 3.93 |
| 16 | Hebrew | 8th | 0.15 | 2.66 |
| 17th | Portuguese | 8th | 0.15 | 1.82 |
| 18th | Swedish | 7th | 0.13 | 1.25 |
| 19th | Sorbian | 7th | 0.13 | 0.86 |
| 20th | Arabic | 6th | 0.11 | 0.60 |
| 21st | Hungarian | 6th | 0.11 | 0.42 |
| 22nd | Japanese | 4th | 0.07 | 0.29 |
| 23 | Norwegian | 4th | 0.07 | 0.21 |
| 24 | Afrikaans | 3 | 0.06 | 0.16 |
| 25th | Greenlandic | 3 | 0.06 | 0.10 |
| 26th | Malay | 3 | 0.06 | 0.07 |
The table is arranged according to ranks, with the languages of origin listed according to the number of words they have adopted. “Number of words” indicates how many words were borrowed from the relevant language of origin into German. Words that came into German via several languages are the language from which the words were borrowed, not the original language. “Coffee” comes from Arabic (presumably the original language) and reached German through several intermediate stages, most recently from French (original language). The word was included here as a borrowing from French. The “relative proportion” indicates what proportion of all borrowed words the respective language of origin has. Finally, the “Calculation” column indicates how many words would have to be borrowed from the language in question if the specified mathematical model is adapted to the observed data.
The calculation is carried out with c = y 1 , a and b are the parameters of the model that perfectly reflects the trend of borrowings with D = 0.99, since D can at best reach the value 1.00. ( D is the coefficient of determination , the test criterion that indicates whether the fit of the model to the data was successful or not. The fit is considered successful if D ≥ 0.80.)
You have to take into account here that etymological dictionaries only ever list a small part of the vocabulary of a language, less than 5% if you have extensive dictionaries such as Duden. The German Universal Dictionary with its well over 200,000 headwords is used for comparison, which also by no means completely cover the German vocabulary; many new borrowings, derivations, compounds and new formations (neologisms) are (still) missing. The relative position of the languages of origin in the ranking seems to be correct in principle. On the other hand, etymological dictionaries are generally not particularly rich in borrowings; So one must not misunderstand the absolute values in the table as numerically precise information about the foreign and loan words in German. For example, the table only lists 4 words from Japanese; in fact around 500 loans are known. In almost all cases, Japanese is both the language of origin and the language of origin.
From the point of view of quantitative linguistics, all such investigations have shown that Altmann's model captures the findings very well for any ranking.
Further literature
- Karl-Heinz Best: The spectrum of foreign words in Turkish. In: Glottometrics 17, 2008, pages 8–11 (PDF full text ).
- Karl-Heinz Best: To the etymological spectrum of the Hundeshagener Kochum. In: Göttinger Contributions to Linguistics 19, 2009, pages 25–29. (Published at the end of 2011.)
- Karl-Heinz Best: On the spectrum of foreign words in Japanese. In: Glottotheory 3/1, 2010, pp. 5-8.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Finkenstaedt, Dieter Wolff: Ordered Profusion. Studies in Dictionaries and the English Lexicon with contributions by H. Joachim Heuhaus and Winfried Herget. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1973, pages 118–120.
- ^ Friedrich Kluge, edited by Elmar Seebold: Etymological Dictionary of the German Language. 24th, revised and expanded edition. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, ISBN 978-3-11-017473-1 .
- ^ Katharina Ternes: Developments in the German vocabulary. In: Glottometrics 21, 2011, pages 25–53 (PDF full text ).
- ^ Karl-Heinz Best : A model for the etymological spectrum of the vocabulary. In: Naukovyj Visnyk Černivec'koho Universytetu: Herman'ska filolohija, Vypusk 266, 2005, pages 11-21.
- ^ Gabriel Altmann : Phoneme Counts. In: Gabriel Altmann (ed.): Glottometrika 14. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1993, ISBN 3-88476-081-5 , pages 54-68.
- ^ Scientific advice of the Duden editorial team (ed.): Duden, German Universal Dictionary. 6th edition. Dudenverlag, Mannheim / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-411-05506-7 .
- ↑ Barbara Haschek, Gothild Thomas: Small lexicon of German words of Japanese origin from Aikido to Zen. Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-56813-8 , page 7.