English Loans in a Current Modern High German Periodical

English Loans in a Current Modern High German Periodical Garland Cannon andJ. Alan Pfeffer Background and purposes T! 1IiIs is the fifth in a series of studies of the primarily lexical interaction between English and Neuhochdeutsch (Modern High German, hereafter, German) . Initiating the three studies based on standard English dictionaries, Pfeffer's Deutsches Sprachgut im Wortschatz der Amerikaner und Engländer (1987) collected more than 3,000 German loans (a rubric term for loanwords and partial translations ) . This total required a striking revision of the previous views that German transfers into English were comparatively few and had little impact (Carr 1934, 88-89). Cannon's studies of loans in English (1992, 1994, 1996, etc.) led to an invitation to join Pfeffer in what became their German Loanwords in English (1994), which discovered 5,380 words and multiword units in standard English dictionaries, plus an additional 621 items collected from elsewhere. The chief semantic fields are scientific: mineralogy, chemistry, biology, geology, and biology. Third, Cannon (1998a) analyzed 253 German items borrowed into English between 1950 and 1993, extracted from the American new-word collections Third Barnhart Dictionary of New English (1991) (BDNE3) and Merriam-Webster's Addenda Section 1993 (MWAS), and The Barnhart Dictionary Companion (1982- ) (BDC). These items primarily denote (in descending order) politics, business, geology, food, health, and zoology. Reversing the principle of finding items only in dictionaries , Cannon and Pfeffer (2000) next compiled their own dictionary of shortenings (a rubric term for the many alphabetisms and a few otiier reductions) used in recent issues of two representative German Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 24 (2003) 98Garland Cannon and J. Alan Pfeffer periodicals, serving as a partial check on the Anglizismen in Carstensen's standard collection (1993-96), the comprehensiveness of Duden's ten-volume set (1999), and on Cannon's 1989 findings about English abbreviations (a rubric term for the many alphabetisms and some acronyms). The 2000 study found that the commonly retained -(e)s plurals on the primarily post-Worid War II English abbreviations in the eight issues suggest that such retention has helped to complete the standardization of these borrowed inflections alongside the historical German -0, -e, er, and -(e) ? plurals. The 326 abbreviations, many of which are English loans collected in Cannon and Pfeffer (2000), indicate that some abbreviations may also be contributing to a diminution in German grammatical gender on those items, perhaps previewing the long road that eliminated grammatical gender in English. Finally, Pfeffer and Cannon questioned whether such leveling is reflected in non-abbreviations in at least the written form of the general language. We accept Wells's conclusion (1985, 538) that one cannot disregard the deliberate constructs in English and German abbreviations as a kind of "specialist language" or jargon irrelevant to the lexicon and grammatical structures. Indeed, our 326 abbreviations appeared in periodicals for educated German readers representing a wide range of disciplines. Now we have collected 1,418 English-based items from the February/March and April/May 2000 issues of the bimonthly Deutschland: Zeitschrift für Politik, Kultur, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft , eschewing a larger corpus because of the many additional items evidently resident in each successive issue. As we detected little potential leveling in non-abbreviations in the two issues, we concentrated on the collecting and especially a wide-ranging analysis of the items (see Appendix 1, below), with checks on our findings in the 2000 article and in Duden's and Carstensen's data, in view of the increasingly huge inflow of recent English transfers into German. Our analysis of the 1,418 items describes their etymology; adaptation (particularly German graphemics and phonology); semantics; grammar including pluralization and retention of English -(e) s, word-formation primarially in terms of productivity, hybridization, and word-classes; syntax in terms of the German articles used to specify gender; a projected scale to measure the items' frequencies and degrees of naturalization; and, overall, die general impact of English in the Deutschland texts. Problems in determining the corpus We continued to exclude the encyclopedic-type items, as in the purely biographical or geographical President Clinton and Washington. English Loans in a Current Modern High German Periodical99 Still, we again faced four...