Capturing the Zeitgeist Native German Loanwords in ... - Skemman

16 Þorsteinn Hjaltason
numbers from the corpora. Here, I will also compare the results from BNC to the results
from COCA to demonstrate the difference between the frequency and usage of German
loanwords in UK and US English.
6.2 All Words
Of all 6,010 words (the main part and the appendix) in GLIE, 1,266 are to be
classified as native German, which means 21%. The proportion is lower if we just count
the words in the main part: 910 of 5,389 which makes 17%. In the Appendix, it is the
other way around, because 57% or 356 of 621 words are native German, although only
8% of them occur in either corpus.
In addition to the words in GLIE, twenty one words were found in various lists, like
Knapp's German English Words and Wikipedia, but some of the words in these lists did
not qualify because they were dialectal (Yiddish or coming from some local dialect).
The distribution between corpora (and those occurring in neither corpus) in the main
part of GLIE and the Appendix, as well as the few words that are not in GLIE are
presented in Table 1:
Table 1: All 1,288 native German Loanwords found
All words
Main
part
Appendix Not in
GLIE
1,288 910 356 22
Both in BNC and
COCA 291 23% 269 30% 11 3% 11 50%
Just in BNC 60 5% 54 6% 4 1% 2 9%
Just in COCA
Occurs in NEITHER
186 14% 164 18% 15 4% 7 32%
corpus 751 58% 423 46% 326 92% 2 9%
TOTAL 1,288 100% 910 100% 356 100% 22 100%
All words
Occurs somewhere
Occurs in NEITHER
537 42%
corpus 751 58%
TOTAL 1,288 100%
In the appendix, the total 1,288 German loanwords are presented in two tables (Table
11 and Table 12): first those that DO NOT occur in either corpus, and then those found
in either corpus. In table 11, I only include the word class, the semantic field and
Cannon’s Degree of acculturation. The second one is much more detailed with seven