Project Details
Projekt
Travelling Words: The Way of German Loanwords in Polish into East Slavic Languages - Lexicographical Internet Portal
Applicant
Professor Dr. Gerd Hentschel
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
from 2013 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 232675560
The aim of the study is a computer-supported, historical-lexicographical compilation of the German loanwords in Polish, as described in the Wörterbuch der deutschen Lehnwörter im Polnischen, WDLP (de A. Vincenz / G. Hentschel (applicant) 2011), that have a correlate in the East Slavic languages, i.e. Belarusian, Ukrainian and / or Russian. German loanwords in these three languages are largely either borrowed via Polish (German loanwords in a broader sense) or directly from German (German loanwords in a narrow sense). In many cases, up until the 18th century Belarusian and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) were intermediaries for loanwords between Polish and Russian. At the latest, from the 19th century onwards Germanisms were increasingly mediated from Russian into the other East Slavic languages, in some cases even into Polish. Not least, Germanisms could have been loaned to Ukrainian directly from German while Eastern Galicia belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Consequently, the study is concerned with the description of originally German words that were loaned to Slavic languages within a large culturally and historically-politically connected area to the east of Germany. If the target quantity of lexicographical descriptions of Germanisms in East Slavic that have correlates with the same German origin word in Polish is named above as the target items, then it certainly does not always mean that Polish was the mediator. As mentioned, many roads lead from German to East Slavic. Loanwords and their paths through space and time are understood here as linguistic reflexes to cultural contact.The data from the study will be presented in a lexicographic internet portal of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The product of this project will be one of several dictionaries in the portal. The portal should offer the opportunity to include further lexicographical works on German loanwords in other languages and also provide structures for accessing all dictionaries to facilitate searches with complex combinations of lexicographical content (word forms as well as their characteristics and relations).
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Belarus, Russia, Ukraine
