Stefan Michael Newerkla

Probleme der empirischen Lehnwortforschung: Lehnwörter im Basiswortschatz (Slowenisch) und ein frequenzbasierter Ansatz (Kroatisch)

The present paper discusses in detail the project Loanwords in the world’s languages, initiated by Haspelmath/Tadmor (2009a, b). It mainly focuses on the proposed methodological design of the crosslinguistic analysis of lexical borrowings in the world’s languages. The main idea is to survey the types of loandwords in the core vocabulary of languages on the basis of a fixed list of 1,460 lexical meanings. After the discussion of the main theoretical issues and the methodological design, two different approaches of the determination of the core vocabulary are proposed. One approach is the reduction of the 1,460 lexical meanings according to the generally known Swadesh-list, which consists of only 200 lexical meanings. The empirical dimension of the analysis of loan words is shown by means of an adapted Swadesh-list for Slovene. The second approach is a frequency based one and implies the analysis of the lexical material provided by frequency dictionaries. The analysis of the 1,500 most frequent lexical items of a balanced Croatian frequency dictionary shows a surprisingly high number of loanwords. It appears that both approaches can be regarded as useful for the empirical examination of loan relations.

Der Tschechischunterricht (und der Slowakischunterricht) in Österreich von seinen Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart

The article focuses on the history of the Czech (and Slovak) language teaching tradition in Austria as revealed by the study of the relevant literature and its respective sources. It is shown that this continuous tradition has been subjected to tremendous changes since the time of the reign of Maria Theresia, especially throughout the twentieth century. The article hints also at how the decisive changes were directly influenced by political, social and economic concerns of the Czech (Slovak) and Austrian nations as well as larger developments in Europe. As can be seen, Czech (and Slovak) language teaching served as the guardian of a centuries-old Czech (and Slovak) tradition in Austria, responding only to gradual change and the impact of external events.