| Abstract |
In the etymological information for a word in a dictionary, the first question to be answered is whether the word is a borrowing or the result of word formation. Here, we consider this question for internationalisms ending in -ation in German and in -ácia in Slovak. In German, -ation is a suffix that attaches to verbs in -ieren. For these verbs, it is in competition with -ung. In Slovak, -ácia is a suffix that attaches to bases of Latin or Greek origin. The corresponding verbs are often backformations. Most Slovak verbs also have a nominalization in -nie. In order to investigate to what extent the nouns in -ation or -ácia are borrowings or derived from the corresponding verbs in German and Slovak, we took a random sample of English nouns in -ation for which OED gives a corresponding verb. For this sample, we checked whether the cognate noun in -ation or -ácia is attested in standard dictionaries and in corpora. Then we did the same for the corresponding verbs and the nouns in -ung or -nie. Finally, we checked the frequency of these words in DeReKo for German and SNK for Slovak. On this basis, we found evidence that -ation in German has a slightly different status to -ácia in Slovak. This status affects the relationship to the corresponding verbs and to the nouns in -ung or -nie. Such generalizations are important as background information for specifying etymological information in dictionaries, especially for languages where first attestations dates are not readily available. |
| BibTex |
@inproceedings{euralex_mannheim_etymology_2022,
address = {Mannheim},
title = {The {Etymology} of {Internationals}. {Evidence} from {German} and {Slovak}},
isbn = {978-3-937241-87-6},
shorttitle = {Euralex (2022)},
url = {},
language = {eng},
booktitle = {Dictionaries and {Society}. {Proceedings} of the {XX} {EURALEX} {International} {Congress}},
publisher = {IDS-Verlag},
author = {ten Hacken, Pius and Panocová, Renáta},
editor = {Klosa-Kückelhaus, Annette and Engelberg, Stefan and Möhrs, Christine and Storjohann, Petra},
year = {2022},
pages = {792--802},
} |
