Good on German, Bad on Yiddish

Deutsche Einflüsse auf den englischen Wortschatz in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Mit einem Beitrag zum Amerikanischen Englisch von Jürgen Eichhoff, Anthony W. Stanforth. Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 165 Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996. Pp. 200

Based on both primary and secondary sources, this book is a good summary of German influence on English vocabulary, mostly British, from earliest times to the present, with emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Since the book consists of expository prose, not of dictionary entries, a word index would enhance its value. A subject index would be useful, too. Because the authors treat certain items more than once (at times inconsistently), a word index would have facilitated the addition of more cross-references (and the elimination of inconsistencies). Those defects aside, this volume is full of new and useful information.

Before we turn to the only serious problem with the book (that is, Yiddish influence on English), let some specific points be raised (all translations are mine):

1. It is high time to stop speaking of "the mixed character" of English (4) and of English as a "mixed language" (169). All languages are mixed (that is, their elements come from more than one language), any seeming "purity" being merely an illusion resulting from our lack of etymological information.

2. For two reasons, it would be good in descriptive linguistics to stop using the term interference (which has its place only in prescriptive linguistics and in the teaching of second languages): people often take it to be a pejorism, and it has nothing over the straightforward word influence.

3. Since only immediate transfer exhibits the influence of one lect on another (for instance, the etymological chain "Yiddish > German > English" shows Yiddish influence on German and German influence on English but not Yiddish influence on English), "indirect borrowing" (6, 105, 130, and elsewhere) is impossible. Thus, all of Stanforth's and Eichhoff's examples of "indirect" German influence on English actually illustrate non-German influence. They have no place in this book except as an afterthought to alert the reader that they are not germanisms.

4. Similarly, if an allolingual-origin form has spin-offs ("bereits entlehnte Wörter ziehen die . . . Neubildung weiterer Wörter nach sich," 17), they do not result from the influence of the lending language, an example being English kitschy, which was coined in English by adding English -y to English kitsch, which is a germanism. Spin-offs have no place in this book except as afterthoughts to alert the reader that they are not germanisms.

5. Stanforth speaks of "revival of obsolete words under foreign influence" ("Wiederbelebung veralteter Wörter unter fremden Einfluß," 32), his example being English overview. Used, for example, by Shakespeare, this word later became obsolete. In the twentieth century, German Überblick and Übersicht were translated into English as overview. Etymologically, then, we have overview ¹ and overview ², the coiners of the newer word probably being unaware of the older one. If so, rather than a revival of an obsolete word under German influence, we have a German-inspired lexeme which happens to be formally identical to an obsolete English lexeme of non-German origin. As with kitschy, the non-German-origin form should be noted only to ensure that people do not mistake it for a germanism.

6. Stanforth says (86) that French influence accounts for the fact that English schottische (disyllabic) and Porsche (monosyllabic) have one syllable less than their German etymons, respectively [die] schottische [Tanz] ~ [die] schottische [Rundtanz] (trisyllabic) and Porsche (disyllabic); that is, nonpronunciation of the final letter of those English words resulted from the fact that, in Modern Standard French, word-final e in nonmonosyllabic words is not pronounced. That explanation may credit anglophones with greater knowledge of French than most of them have and French with greater influence on English than it has had. In fact, it is impossible to see French influence in the English pronunciation of Porsche, and the...