German

The article calls into question the understanding of the Kočevska (Gottschee) area as a “German language island”. Through examples of the use of different languages before the Second World War, it shows a different –multilingual or multicultural– image of this region. The author draws data from historical and archival sources, as well as from a survey that she conducted among Gottscheers (“Gottschee Germans”) living in Slovenia, Austria, Germany, the USA and Canada. Keywords: Gottschee, Gottscheers, Gottschee Germans, multilingualism, nationalism, linguistically mixed regions, linguistic islands, national identity

The connections between the atrocities committed by German colonial forces in German South West Africa and the mass murders perpetrated by Nazi Germany later in Central and Eastern Europe have become an important aspect of the scholarly debate about German colonialism. This article tests several elements of these continuity claims: whether there was elite continuity between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich, whether formal and informal knowledge about the atrocities in the German colony were available to and used by the Nazi elites and whether the former German colonies played a role in foreign policy strategies of the Third Reich. The author deems it more appropriate to speak about a rupture rather than continuity between colonial elites and the Nazi movement, he argues, that formal knowledge about colonial violence was hardly available to the Nazis and they did not even consult the scarce institutional knowledge which would have been available. Informal knowledge was available b...

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The topic of this paper is to study to what extent a contrastive analysis can contribute to the analy-sis of discourse markers. Another issue which is explored is whether the contrastive analysis can be enriched by considering the grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of ...

(= Slavonic names for mosque with special regard to Polish, Silesian, Czech and Slovak data). -- Abstract: Even though mosques are a typical element of the Islamic culture the channels through which their designations came into Slavonic (as well as some other European languages) are not really well known. This author divides Slavonic reflexes of the Arabo-Turkic word into eight groups and discusses the reasons for their various shapes. The essay is composed of three parts: (1) Background and Western European data; (2) Slavonic and German; (3) Results and questions. The most interesting aspect is that of a semantic difference between two types of words (meczet ~ mešita ~ mošeja and džamija) and its importance for the etymology, as well as some comments on the source of the Czech and Slovak word on the one hand and the Russian term on the other. In the end of part (2) particular attention is paid to the question whether the Silesian name was borrowed from Polish or from Czech.

Farbe Diplomarbeit Michael Maeder and der Schule für Gestaltung in St.Gallen. Als Farbe bezeichnen wir Empfindungen des Gehirns, die auf dem Wege über das Auge durch Licht hervorgerufen werden. Lichtwellen sind ebenso beschaffen wie Radiowellen, nur wesentlich kürzerer Wellenlänge

The significance of speech and language processing skills and letter knowledge for successful literacy acquisition has been repeatedly confirmed by international research findings. However, the importance of these skills for early literacy success in German speakers remains unclear. This longitudinal study aimed to explore this issue. Sixty-nine German-speaking children were assessed in nursery a few months before starting school (mean age 5;11) and in Grade 1 (mean age 6;11) on tests of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, expressive vocabulary, grammar comprehension, letter knowledge and nonverbal reasoning. Grade 1 assessments also included measures of reading accuracy, speed, comprehension and spelling. The results confirmed that speech and language processing skills and letter knowledge before and around the time of school enrolment explain individual differences in early literacy development, with letter knowledge and phonological awareness emerging as most important predictors. No variance in literacy performance was uniquely predicted by nonverbal reasoning.

https://brill.com/view/title/57200
This chapter proposes a new reading of Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language that concentrates on human sympathy for animals. The ostensible aim of the Treatise is to shed light on the unique human traits which lead to the creation of human language. According to Herder, sympathy denotes the uniqueness of humans’ orientation in the world; it manifests their non-instrumental relationship to their surroundings. However, at the same time as he presents sympathy as a sentiment that marks the singularity of humans, Herder portrays sympathy as an illustration for the proximity between humans and animals. This proximity is elucidated in uses of sounds that precede developed human language, such as the expression of pain. Herder’s explanation of the rudimentary use of sounds through the prism of anthropological relativism reveals his refusal to describe humans as superior to animals. This chapter argues that Herder’s cultural pluralism accommodates the positioning of human language in a system of other creaturely languages. Sympathy makes palpable a secondary thread in the Treatise, a line of argumentation that parallels animals with humans and that demonstrates performatively the possibility that humans could engage with animal communities.

The lexical database dlexDB supplies in form of an online database frequency-based norms of numerous process-related word properties for psychological and linguistic research. These values include well known variables such as printed frequency of word form and lemma as documented also in CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock und Gulikers, 1995). In addition, we compute new values like frequencies based on syllables, and morphemes as well as frequencies of character chains, and multiple word combinations. The statistics are based on the Kernkorpus des Digitalen Wörterbuchs der deutschen Sprache (DWDS) with over 100 million running words. We illustrate the validity of these norms with new results about fixation durations in sentence reading.

The discussion on the role of corrective feedback is part of a larger discussion on the role of ‘focusing on form’ in foreign language teaching (Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998). Studies conducted in communicative and content-based foreign language teaching (FLT) settings have shown that some focus on form seems to be required for learners to ‘notice the gap’ (in: R. Day (Ed.), Talking to Learn, Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp. 237–326) between their erroneous utterances and the target language.This article discusses the role of different types of oral corrective feedback in analytic FLT. Stern (in: B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins, M. Swain (Eds.), The Development of Second Language Proficiency, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 93–109; Issues and options in language teaching, Oxford University Press, Oxford) refers to FLT as analytic when the focus of instruction is on the form of the foreign language as opposed to more content-based approaches where the focus is on meaning and content. Typical for analytic FLT are discrete point presentation along with feedback on formal error. This type of FLT is still common practice in Belgian secondary schools.The study explores the role of different kinds of corrective feedback in an analytic setting (German as a foreign language in Flanders, Belgium). The frequency and distribution of several corrective feedback types together with the frequency and distribution of different types of learner uptake following each feedback type (see Stud. Second Language Acquisit. 19 (1997) 37) are discussed. The question then is which strategy is to be preferred in terms of noticing the feedback.