Therm

This article deals with the word component Therm . For the unit of the same name for energy see: Therm (unit)

therm is a word component ( word constituent ) that comes from the Greek (θερμός "thermós" "warm, hot, heated") and occurs in many German foreign words with corresponding meanings: thermals , thermometers and many others.

Forms of therm

The word component therm / thermo can be used at the beginning of the word as therm- (e.g. thermal) or thermo- (e.g. thermometer), inside the word as -therm- (e.g. hyperthermia) and at the end of the word as -therm (e.g. B. endothermic) can be used. Whether therm- or thermo- is chosen depends on whether the next part of the word begins with a vowel or not. In front of the vowel is therm- : "thermal", "thermelectrically" or thermo- : "thermoelectrically", "Thermoofen"; before consonant thermo- : "Thermolampe", "Thermometer".

On the status of therm from a linguistic point of view

Therm cannot be used as a word on its own; it must always be combined with at least one derivative morpheme such as -e , -ie or -ik (e.g. Therme) or with a lexeme (e.g. thermocouple). However, as mentioned above, Therm has a clear lexical meaning; hence it must be viewed as a bound lexical morpheme ; it is one of the lexemes . The term Konfix has also become established for this in specialist literature (Fleischer & Barz 1995).

The two different phonetic forms therm and thermo can be understood as allomorphs of this bound lexical morpheme.

On the meaning and development of therm in German

Schmidt (1987) devoted his own study to the word constituent therm , in which he evaluated various sources: text corpora, word collections, advertising media, collections of trademarks and lexicons. In a list of uses still in use today, therm / thermo occurs most frequently as the first component with 223 uses, 62 times in the middle of the word and 14 times at the end of the word (Schmidt 1987: 437–440). The largest part of the determined vocabulary belongs with approx. 85% to the scientific technical language or medicine and only approx. 15% to the common language (Schmidt 1987: 436f.). A separate list shows when a word with therm / thermo as the first word component appears for the first time; it is a total of 118 different datable words that have been in use since the 18th century. It can be shown that this process of expansion follows the law of language change (Best 2005: 82), which is also known in linguistics as Piotrowski's law .

literature

• Karl-Heinz Best (2005). Quantitative Linguistics: A Plea. In: Gabriel Altmann, Viktor Levickij & Valentina Perebyinis (eds.): Problemy kvantytatyvnoï linhvistyky / Problems of Quantitative Linguistics: zbirnyk naukovych prac ' . Ruta, Černivci, pp. 76-88. ISBN 966-568-783-2 (This article shows that the spread of therm in German follows the Piotrowski law .)
• Wolfgang Fleischer, Irmhild Barz, with the collaboration of Marianne Schröder: Word formation in contemporary German. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1995. 2nd, revised and supplemented edition. ISBN 3-484-10682-4 .
• Günter Dietrich Schmidt: Therm (o). Investigations into morphosyntax, history, semantics and other aspects of a productive LWF unit in today's German . In: Gabriele Hoppe, Alan Kirkness, Elisabeth Link, Isolde Nortmeyer, Wolfgang Rettig & Günter Dietrich Schmidt: Deutsche Loehnwortbildung. Contributions to the research of word formation with borrowed WB units in German . Narr, Tübingen 1987, pp. 409-440. ISBN 3-87808-464-1