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

22 Þorsteinn Hjaltason
6.5 The words that were found in either corpus
Table 6: The 10 most frequent Semantic Fields of all 537 occurring words
Semantic
Field
Number
of Words
% of
1,288
The 10 most
frequent semantic
Fields in GLIE
Miscellany 83 15% Mineralogy 16%
Politics 58 11% Chemistry 13%
Food 46 9% Biology 6%
Military 41 8% Geology 6%
Music 38 7% Miscellany 4%
Beverages 26 5% Botany 4%
Geology 21 4% Politics 4%
Philosophy 20 4% Music 3.5%
Sports 20 4% Medicine 3.5%
Sociology 17 3% Biochemistry 3.5%
Remaining
Semantic
Fields
86 16%
TOTAL 537 100%
Table 6 presents some pertinent data from table 3 in compact form. These statistics
speak for themselves and pose few surprises. The most common fields are either
common words, World War Two vocabulary (political and military words) or
culinary/beverage words.
Table 7: The Degree of acculturation of those occurring
GRADING NUMBER %
No grading 19 3.5%
Grading 1 30 5.5%
Grading 2 61 11%
Grading 3 234 44%
Grading 4 193 36%
TOTAL 537 100%
Compared to the statistics in GLIE, the numbers in table 7 are somewhat to be
expected; 79% fall into grading three or four. However, the inequality between grading
two and four is quite different from the facts in GLIE, and more like one would have
predicted. This, along with the results from the 5, shows that any assumptions about
integrity of loanwords based on its number of occurrences in a handful of dictionaries is
vague.
%