Internationalism (language)

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A internationalism is a word that in several languages at the same or at least very similar meaning exists and origin. The word is spoken similarly in the different languages ​​and written identically or similarly and is therefore understandable in different languages ​​(e.g. German function , English function , French fonction , Russian функция funkcija etc.).

The more widespread a word is internationally, the more it deserves the name “internationalism”. Internationalisms are sometimes seen as "important mediators between cultures" and as "representatives of positive globalism on the level of science and morality". The international planned language Interlingua is based on the idea of ​​internationalisms.

Apparent or genuine internationalisms or similarities of linguistic expressions in one and in another language harbor the risk of false friends , i. That is, they give the impression of apparent meaning identity or relationship of meaning, which easily leads to translation errors.

Spread

The internationalisms spread in different ways, very old internationalisms may have developed from common roots. In most cases, however, borrowing has contributed to its spread. However, many have only recently become internationalisms, especially when designating new scientific or technical terms or terms from sport and society.

Every language has special features in the phonology and spelling of internationalisms. Declination endings are usually adjusted. The spelling is also often adjusted.

Sometimes certain internationalisms are changed or experience a shift or narrowing of meaning when they are translated into other languages. With typical internationalisms, however, the essential meaning is constant.

A smaller number of words that can be counted among the internationalisms are onomatopoeic and, so to speak, borrowed from nature. Examples of this are animal names such as cuckoo , which imitate the sound made by the animal, but also words such as [mama] and [papa] or [tata], which have their origin in the babbling of babies, with a meaning assigned by adults.

Most widespread internationalisms

The most widespread internationalisms are geographical in nature or names of peoples , companies, and brand names . In addition to words with the character of proper names, there are a number of terms that are derived from geographical names or from personal proper names. These include various “ isms ” and their “Isten”, discoveries in the field of medicine or in another science, units of measurement ( volts , amperes , ohms , newtons , watts , joules , kelvins , etc.), breeds and subspecies of domestic animals and cultivated plants , Minerals and more. International words or parts of words of this kind have mostly penetrated into all languages ​​in which the corresponding term is known, i.e. into all extended languages .

In second place are names for previously unknown chemical substances and raw materials ( minerals and manufactured materials, for example textiles , plastics , alloys and composite materials , natural and artificial drugs , luxury foods and more). Most of these words have spread from the West or through occidental mediation into almost all languages spoken outside of China . The Chinese prefer loan translations and their own neologisms because loanwords are usually difficult to adapt to the structure of the language and are not easily reproduced using Chinese characters . The only problem-free neologisms are those which have been introduced in Japanese and are already represented there with Chinese characters ( Kanji ).

The exceptions that have managed to invade China include the words for coffee (咖啡ka fei , also 咖啡因ka fei yin , ' caffeine ') and chocolate (巧克力qiao ke li ). These substances are called something like this in almost all languages.

The word coffee comes from the Arabic qahwa and chocolate from the Aztec chicolatl , which is formed from Nahuatl chicol 'whisk' + a 'water' + tl (noun suffix ). The word with an [i] in the first syllable seems to have first become known in Europe, and is preserved in a number of Romance dialects and small languages, as well as in Turkish . The form with an [o], also coming from Nahuatl, was later distributed through Spanish mediation.

The word cacao had the Aztecs from a Mayan language borrowed, and there was also a word kakauatl for one of cocoa and corn brewed beverage.

Nowadays, both a protected brand name and a generic generic name for the same substance are introduced for new drugs , e.g. B. Sildenafil for Viagra . Otherwise it often happens that brand names for popular products lose their status as brand names in practice and are also used for the corresponding products of other manufacturers. This is e.g. E.g. with the word aspirin , which was introduced by Bayer AG in 1899 for an acetylsalicylic acid preparation, but has now adopted the common language meaning 'acetylsalicylic acid preparation' almost all over the world, including in China but not in Sweden .

A new phenomenon is that the use of traditional common-language internationalisms is also being restricted by law. This can be done at the initiative of commercial interest groups who are keen to limit the meaning of words like jam or chocolate to products from their own range. So it is that block chocolate is now sold as “block” and alpine milk chocolate even as “alpine milk”.

Some other internationalisms that are commonplace in German and all occur in a similar form and meaning in the languages ​​of more than two billion people:

Academy - Pineapple - Antenna - Athlete - Atom - Bar - Bus - Dictator - Diploma - Director - Gorilla - Harmony - Hotel - Inspection - Internet - Cable - Cabin - Colony - Comedy - Copy - Corridor - Coupon - League - Magnet - Margarine - Jam - Machine - Medal - Microphone - Microscope - Motor - Number - OK - Olympics - Operation - Party - Pedal - Gun - Polyclinic - Police - Radio - Register - Sandal - Sardine - Satan - Signal - Sport - Station - Studio - Taxi - Television - tennis - test - tractor - transport - trolleybus - tsunami - visa - center .

Culture-bound internationalisms

Internationalisms are particularly widespread in certain disciplines, such as medicine and technology, but most, especially the older ones, are specific to one culture , i.e. H. limited to one civilization . In the present world there are four predominant civilizations with more than a thousand years of tradition: the Occidental, the Islamic, the Indian and the East Asian. Each of these civilizations or cultures comprises more than a billion people, and each of them has its own store of internationalisms.

Occidental

The occidental, originally European cultural area includes the entire western world , including the peoples with Orthodox tradition . The contemporary occidental civilization has strong roots in ancient Greece, in Christianity and in the Enlightenment .

Many of the internationalisms common in European languages ​​are based on their origins in ancient Greek, Latin, newly formed from ancient Greek and Latin elements, French, English or from exotic sources through these languages, such as boomerang , catamaran , taboo and tomahawk . The Spanish has given many products are named, from America, in addition to the chocolate , for example, the tomato (in some places called something else). The German language has also produced some internationalisms, e.g. B. Edelweiss , kitsch , central pain , cereal , quartz , snorkel and zigzag . Internationalisms often arise from the local names for certain conditions or objects that are characteristic of the regions or were initially. Italian has contributed a number of internationalisms to the technical languages ​​of music (e.g. crescendo , opera ) and finance (e.g. bank , credit ).

Already in Latin there were many loan words from ancient Greek . In French there are not only hereditary words from Latin, which were sometimes borrowed from Greek there, but also many new formations from Greek or Latin elements. Such new formations have also been created by other Europeans, especially in the field of science. Many French words have been incorporated into English over the past six centuries . There they are usually written exactly as in French , but pronounced differently. Also the meaning is sometimes not the same in the two languages. In such cases one speaks of “ false friends ” who can mislead second language speakers. From the 17th to the 19th century in particular, loanwords from French were also introduced en masse into continental European languages, sometimes in the East by German and further to Central Asia by Russian . In these cases the pronunciation is not so different from the French one. In the 20th century, English became the dominant source language.

Since the 20th century, Japanese and Korean have adopted the new Western internationalisms, mostly from American English, but also directly from other European languages. Even the Turkish and Indonesian (not so much the Malay ) has the the pursuit of European internationalisms from French or Dutch opened. In the non-occidental languages ​​of the British Empire , a smaller, common selection of loan words from English has become at home. It is the spoken form that is borrowed, while English follows the other European languages ​​better in the written form.

Islamic

The Islamic culture is strongly influenced by Islam , which is not only a religion, but also a social order. The holy scripture of Muslims , the Koran (القرآن), is written in Arabic and is also recited in this language by people who speak other languages. In this way, as well as through the formation of Islamic states and the long-distance trade operated by Arab merchants, loanwords from Arabic have spread throughout the entire cultural area. Later, Persian also became an important source and communication language, especially because it was the official language in northern India for 5 centuries . In linguistic terms, the north of India, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh , belongs to both the Indian and the Islamic cultures. The Arabic script used to be in use throughout the culture, but now the Latin script is used for several of the languages ​​such as Turkish , Swahili and Malay / Indonesian . The Arab is a Semitic language and its vocabulary has similarities with that of the Semitic languages of the earlier civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Levant ( Akkadian , Aramaic , Hebrew and others). In Arabic there are also a limited number of words borrowed from the ancient Greek and Latin . Other Islamic-occidental similarities go back to the common roots of Christianity and Islam in the Abrahamic tradition.

Example words from this culture area:

Arabic , Persian , Urdu دنيا [dunjaː], world ',' this side ', almost identical in Hindi , Punjabi , Marathi and Bengali ; Malay / Indonesian as well as Swahili dunia , Hausa duniya , Turkish thinya etc.

Arabic , Persian , Urdu كتاب [kitaːb], book ', almost identical in Hindi , Punjabi and Bengali ; Malay / Indonesian kitab , Swahili kitabu , Turkish kitap etc. This also from the Arabic root ktb , write 'derived and ubiquitous maktab , depending on the language, reading room', '', 'Office' 'mean office and school (cf. . Swahili maktaba , reading room ',' library ', otherwise mostly as in Turkish mektep , school, educational institution'). So there is also the problem of “ false friends ” here.

Arabic , Persian , Urdu سفر [safar] 'travel', almost identical in Hindi , Punjabi and Bengali ; Swahili safari , Turkish sefer . From Swahili , this word with the specialized meaning ' safari ' has also found its way into the Western languages ​​as well as into Japanese , Korean and Indonesian . The derivation [musaːfir] 'traveler' is also used everywhere in Islamic culture, also in Malay / Indonesian ( musafir ).

Indian

The Indian cultural area includes the Indian subcontinent ( front India ) and most of Southeast Asia ( rear India ), namely Burma , Thailand , Laos and Cambodia , while Vietnam belongs to the East Asian (Chinese) cultural area. The Indian culture gave birth to Hinduism and Buddhism . The classic source language is Sanskrit . The Southeast Asian island world ( Indonesia ) was also connected to this culture before Islam spread there. For this reason, in addition to new Western internationalisms and somewhat older Islamic ones, one can also find a number of old Indian internationalisms from Sanskrit in Indonesian , such as B. dewa 'deity', manusia 'man' and nama 'name'. In these words one can also see the linguistic similarities that exist between the Indian and the Western cultures because the dominant source languages ​​in both cultures are Indo-European languages . Sanskrit देव [deːvʌ] 'deity' is related to Latin deus and मनुष्य [mʌnʊʂjʌ] 'Mensch' with Germanic words such as German Mensch and Swedishomanniska . In Sanskrit नामन् [naːmʌn] 'name' there is a recognizable relationship with both the Germanic and the Romance languages (Latin nouns ). In the languages ​​of India , also in the non-Indo-Aryan ( South Asian language federation ), there are many traditional internationalisms from Sanskrit, but new formations for modern terms have only rarely caught on in practice. None of India's many languages ​​has developed into a first-rate extension language , and the languages ​​are used only to a very limited extent in secondary and higher education. The language of instruction here is mostly Indian-colored English . A special feature of the Indian culture is that a large number of different scripts are used. However, these have structural similarities and are all derived from the ancient Indian Brahmi script .

East Asian

In East Asian cultures, Chinese has been the dominant language for thousands of years, and it has influenced Korean , Japanese, and Vietnamese to a great extent. In all of these languages, most of the vocabulary is of Chinese origin. Japanese has adopted Chinese loanwords in several waves since the introduction of the Chinese script in the 5th century. The first came with the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century from the Wu dialect (Go-on), the next in the 7th to 9th centuries from northern China (Kan-on) and another around the 17th century (Tō- in). The pronunciation of loanwords represented in Japanese using Chinese characters depends on which period they are ascribed to. Vietnamese has adopted the pronunciation from southern Chinese dialects. Members of the cultural group who speak another language are mostly unable to recognize the internationalisms in spoken form. Even speakers of different Chinese dialects often find it difficult to understand one another. The dialect differences are often too great, especially in the south of China. Sometimes characters can be helpful here, which are drawn with the index finger on the other palm. The linguistic community in this cultural area is thus mainly supported by the use of Chinese writing, in which the meaning of the words and not (or hardly) their sound is reproduced. The Chinese script used to be used throughout the entire cultural area, and this is still true today in a limited sense, although Korean has also had its own script, Hangeul , since the 15th century , and the Latin script is used to write Vietnamese has come. In the 20th century, Japanese and Korean took up loanwords from Western languages ​​en masse. In contrast, very few have penetrated Chinese and Vietnamese.

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Internationalism  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Kocsány, Piroska: Basic Linguistics course: a workbook for beginners. Fink, Paderborn 2010, p. 72.
  2. ↑ Roman Jakobson (1960): “Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?” Perspectives in Psychological Theory: Essays in Honor of Heinz Werner , ed. By B. Kaplan and S. Wagner, 124-134. New York: International Universities Press. Reprinted in Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson, vol 1 (1962), 538-545.
  3. ↑ Karen Dakin, Søren Wichmann (2000): “CACAO AND CHOCOLATE A Uto-Aztecan perspective” Ancient Mesoamerica, 11, 55-75.