Sonderfälle des Sprachtransfers: lateinische Wortbildungsmuster und Vokabelübersetzungen im Deutschen im frühen Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract

Although from the 9th century onwards, textual studies were mostly written in Latin, German played an important role in communicating Latin language skills. The aim of the following discussion is to analyse selected examples of didactically motivated strategies in language transfer from Latin to German. On the one hand, Old High German gloss practices in the 9th–12th centuries incorporate Latin word formation patterns, while on the other hand translation processes (shown here using Thomas Murner’s German version of Virgil’s Aeneid [Strasbourg 1515]) made use of context-free transfers of the primary meanings of Latin words, or “Vokabelübersetzungen” (‘vocabulary translations’, Götz 1961/1977). The two areas of vocabulary presented here are linked by their didactic instrumentalisation in the contact between Latin and the vernacular.