Claudia Müller-Brauers, Christiane Miosga, Fabian Buchmeier
et al.
Digitale Bilderbücher spielen in der frühen Lesesozialisation von Kindern eine immer größere Rolle. Studien weisen jedoch darauf hin, dass das kindliche Verstehen von digitalen Geschichten v.a. von der Materialität des Mediums abhängt. In diesem Beitrag wird daher explorativ untersucht, welche kindlichen narrativen Verstehensprozesse sich im Vorschulalter beim dialogischen Lesen einer Bilderbuch-App mit hohem narrativen Lernpotential rekonstruieren lassen. Dazu werden Videodaten aus einem Lehr-/Praxisprojekt herangezogen, bei dem Kindern im Alter von 4-6 Jahren (N=16) im Anschluss an eine Vorleseinteraktion mit einer zuvor ausgewerteten Bilderbuch-App (Paul und seine Freunde) Impulsfragen zur Geschichte gestellt wurden. Die Interaktionen wurden videographiert, transkribiert sowie konversations- und inhaltsbezogen analysiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich in den Interaktionen eine inhaltsbasierte Auseinandersetzung der Kinder mit der Geschichte rekonstruieren lässt, diese aber unterschiedlich in Bezug auf das Erzählschema der Geschichte ausfällt. Die Befunde werden mit Blick auf die materielle Beschaffenheit der App, entwicklungsbezogene Aspekte und bestehende Forschungsdesiderate in diesem Feld diskutiert.
Abstract (english): Dialogic reading with picture book apps − exploring children's narrative comprehension
Digital picture books are a growing component of early reading socialization. Studies indicate that children's comprehension of digital stories depends on certain features of the medium. We explore children's narrative comprehension in dialogical reading situations based on a picture book app with high narrative learning potential (Paul and his friends). We present results from a teaching project in which students conducted dialogic reading sessions with children aged 4-6 years in German kindergartens (N=16) followed by asking impulse questions about story comprehension. Interactions were videographed, transcribed and analyzed in terms of children's narrative comprehension. Results show that children engage with the content of the story. However, the degree of engagement appears to depend on the story's narrative scheme. Results are discussed with regard to the features of the medium, children's narrative development and future research questions.
Der Artikel gewährt einen Einblick in Leben und Karriere der nahezu vergessenen Breslauer Schriftstellerin Bianca Bobertag (geb. Marbach). Skizziert werden die in ihrem Werk am häufigsten besprochenen Themen, vor allem die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse in intellektuellen Kreisen der in ihrem Werk literarisch gestalteten Universitätsstadt Breslau, sowie die Frauenrechte, ganz besonders die Gleichberechtigung in den Bereichen Bildung und Ehe. Überdies beschäftigt sich der Artikel auch mit einer Spurensuche zu Bianca Bobertags Familie, deren Mitglieder alle eine akademische oder literarische Laufbahn eingeschlagen haben.
Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages, German literature
AbstractThis paper examines definiteness marking in American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage variety of Norwegian spoken in the US. The description adds another language to the much-studied variation within Scandinavian nominal phrases. It builds on established syntactic analysis of Scandinavian and investigates aspects that are (un)like Norwegian spoken in the homeland. A central finding is that the core syntax of Norwegian noun phrases is retained in AmNo, while the morphophonological spell-out is sometimes different. Indefinite determiners, for example, are obligatory in AmNo, but some speakers produce them with non-homeland-like gender agreement. One systematic change is observed: double definiteness has been partially lost. The typical AmNo modified definite phrase lacks the prenominal determiner that is obligatory for varieties in Norway. I argue that this is a syntactic change which allows the realization of D to be optional. This is a pattern not found in the other Scandinavian languages. At the same time, this innovative structure in AmNo is not like English, the dominant language of the AmNo speakers. This demonstrates heritage language change that is distinct from both the homeland language and the dominant language.
In today’s diverse and complex world, naming plays a vital role in communication, preventing confusion and establishing clarity. Researchers in the field of onomastics, a sub-discipline of linguistics, have taken an interest in understanding the significance of names and their underlying meanings. Institutionyms, a sub-branch of ergonomics, specifically analyze the names of all human-created objects, with a focus on institutions/organizations. This study examines the naming process of Turkish and German universities through comprehensive document analysis. The findings revealed intriguing differences in the types of names used by Turkish and German universities, including geographical elements, personal names/surnames/titles, specialization, mission, important dates and event names, and history-related names, compared to German universities. The study offers valuable insights for policymakers, educators, and researchers in understanding the cultural and historical contexts that naming practices can influence. The findings also reveal that there are notable cultural differences in the preference for personal names, with Turkish universities placing more emphasis on this category. Furthermore, German universities focused on using names related to local and national history and events. In contrast, Turkish universities prioritize these types of names, often incorporating them to reflect the heritage and identity of the region or country in which they are located. In conclusion, this study highlights the significance of naming and the impact of cultural and historical contexts on the process and offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and policymakers.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
The present article deals with the travel letters of the German orientalist Oskar Mann (1867-1917). With financial support from the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mann made two expeditions to the Ottoman Empire and Iran between 1901 and 1906 to research the Iranian languages and dialects. Travel letters and travel diariesare texts with relatively subjective value judgments, in which people and cultures are often described using ethnocentric stereotypes, because a real journey represents a cultural encounter and confrontation with the other that offers unique and invaluable information about the new world. The description of a foreign culture cannot be separated from the subjective value judgments of a traveller. This means the foreign world in which the traveller moves is represented by the subject who experiences it. According to Mann, the Orientals are people from a place that has surrendered to the West. He separates the Orient from the Occident with precise and sharp lines and divides them Eurocentrically into two separate categories. During his travels, Mann produced and imparted knowledge about the foreign cultures on the one hand, and on the other hand he spread and reinforced images and prejudices as well as stereotypes that led to the ontological differentiation between Orient and Occident. This essay tries to show that he perceived the Orient with hegemonic thought patterns and that his foreign imagination remained deeply rooted in the classic European orientalist discourse of the 19th century, and as a consequence the Orient was devalued. This study discusses the stereotypes, images and pattern of ideas that he used to represent the population of the foreign country where he travelled.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
Wilken Engelbrecht, Agnieszka Flor-Górecka, K. Křížová
West Germanic languages such as Dutch have a temporal system, but a typical feature of the Slavonic verb system is aspectuality. Most Slavonic borrowed or newlyformed verbs in the technical sphere are based on Latin, however, a language with a rather strict temporal system. Typically, such verbs are mostly borrowed as imperfective (durative) verbs. This paper examines several such verbs and compares their integration into Dutch, Czech and Polish. Dutch has no morphological forms showing aspectuality. However, aspectuality is present, the difference is there a semantic one, between a dynamic or a static character. In this article, ten potentially bi-aspectual verbs borrowed from Latin are discussed, all of them having in Dutch a dynamic character. In Czech and Polish, such verbs will have after borrowing initially a bi-aspectual character. Depending on frequency of use, the verbs will become integrated by adding aspectual prefixes. This integration is illustrated for both Slavonic languages by sentences from recent press articles. Where in the Czech dictionaries, the majority of the analysed verbs are still described as bi-aspectual, it seems that Polish is much faster at changing Latin borrowed verbs into aspectual pairs. One should be, however, cautious as it is often dependent on which dictionary one consults whether a verb is marked as bi-aspectual or as imperfectivum tantum. Nevertheless, the general tendencies are clear.
"Perceptions of Developing Reading and Writing Skills in Swedish in an Online Context. This paper intends to focus on BA students’ reading and writing skills in Swedish as a foreign language in a Scandinavian context. In addition, the study aims to discuss the difficulties students have encountered when studying Swedish as a foreign language in an online academic context amid Covid-19 pandemic. A survey research comprising closed-ended and open-ended questions was conducted by using a questionnaire as the main instrument for collecting data. The respondents were BA students in Norwegian language and literature, enrolled at the Faculty of Letters at Babeș-Bolyai University, who had already studied Norwegian for four semesters in the frame of this programme and who took the one semester optional course in Swedish. The language distance between Norwegian and Swedish is relatively small because both languages are part of the North-Germanic branch. We considered it relevant to explore the manner in which students tackle these similarities, differences and the cross-linguistic transfer between the two languages and whether their reading and writing practices in Norwegian have influenced in any way the acquisition of Swedish. Nowadays, new technological advances provide additional support to foreign language learning and develop learners’ digital literacy. Therefore, the paper aimed at understanding what types of authentic resources are used by students, in order to develop their linguistic and sociolinguistic competence in Swedish. The results showed that students are willing to improve their language skills, as they believe that mastering another Scandinavian language could help them increase their academic and professional opportunities and would constitute an advantage in terms of easiness to develop writing and reading skills in Swedish. Keywords: Norwegian, Swedish, language distance, language similarities, cross-linguistic influence, foreign language learning, BA level "
Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.
This chapter reviews a number of issues concerning Scandinavian object shift and object scrambling of the type found in the Germanic OV-languages. It differs from earlier reviews in that it adopts as its null hypothesis that the two phenomena should be given a unified treatment. An important reason for this is that object shift and scrambling are subject to similar effect-on-output conditions. This raises the question why object shift and scrambling behave differently with respect to, e.g., Holmberg’s Generalization. It will be argued that this is due to the fact that object movement is subject to various language-specific, violable constraints.
This article examines which loaning features indicate that the predecessor of South Saami – Southern Proto-Saami – drifted off from common Late Proto-Saami at an early date. We also suggest that this drift refers to linguistic immigration to central Scandinavia where South Saami is spoken today. Loanword evidence provided are those from Northwest Germanic and Proto-Scandinavian found in South Saami that either have irregular sound substitutes compared to other Saami languages (e.g. South Saami word-medial -r- in snaejrie ‘slice (of bread, cheese)’ cf. Inari Saami -tt- in snáittu ‘splint’; South Saami initial h- in haame ‘antlerless reindeer doe’ cf. North Saami ápmil); they are not found in any other Saami language (e.g. saar- in Saaraahka ‘creative old woman (divinity)’) or they have deviating semantic meaning compared to other Saami languages (South Saami duvrie ‘bear’; cf. North Saami divri ‘insect’). The number of such loanwords is 53 out of about 170. Even those loanwords, which do not show any kind of irregularity when compared to other Saami languages, may have been borrowed into South Saami separately, however they do not contain any of those sounds that started a deviating development after the drift. In absolute chronology, the initial areal and dialectal drift happened in southern Finland around 200 CE. Features presented here are so numerous, though many of them are still quite sporadic, that we find there is sufficient evidence to show the early drift of South Saami. This dating also correlates with the changes seen in archaeological data taken from the South Saami-speaking area. Thus, the changes in archaeological material most likely are caused by Saami speakers arriving to a new land and their intensively active contacts with the people already inhabiting the area.
Few European languages have in the course of their histories undergone as radical changes as English did in the medieval period. The earliest documented variety of the language, Old English (c. 450 to 1100 ce), was a synthetic language, typologically similar to modern German, with its three genders, relatively free word order, rich case system, and verbal morphology. By the beginning of the Middle English period (c. 1100 to 1500), changes that had begun a few centuries earlier in the Old English period had resulted in a remarkable typological shift from a synthetic language to an analytic language with fixed word order, very few inflections, and a heavy reliance on function words. System-internal pressures had a role to play in these changes, but arguably they were primarily due to intensive contacts with other languages, including Celtic languages, (British) Latin, Scandinavian languages, and a little later, French. As a result, English came to diverge from its Germanic sister languages, losing or reducing such Proto-Germanic features as grammatical gender; most inflections on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs; verb-second syntax; and certain types of reflexive marking. Among the external influences, long contacts with speakers of especially Brittonic Celtic languages (i.e., Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbrian) can be considered to have been of particular importance. Following the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from around 450 ce onward, there began an intensive and large-scale process of language shift on the part of the indigenous Celtic and British Latin speaking population in Britain. A general wisdom in contact linguistics is that in such circumstances—when the contact is intensive and the shifting population large enough—the acquired language (in this case English) undergoes moderate to heavy restructuring of its grammatical system, leading generally to simplification of its morphosyntax. In the history of English, this process was also greatly reinforced by the Viking invasions, which started in the late 8th century ce, and brought a large Scandinavian-speaking population to Britain. The resulting contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings also contributed to the decrease of complexity of the Old English morphosyntax. In addition, the Scandinavian settlements of the Danelaw area left their permanent mark in place-names and dialect vocabulary in especially the eastern and northern parts of the country. In contrast to syntactic influences, which are typical of conditions of language shift, contacts that are less intensive and involve extensive bilingualism generally lead to lexical borrowing. This was the situation following the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 ce. It led to an influx of French loanwords into English, most of which have persisted in use up to the present day. It has been estimated that almost one third of the present-day English vocabulary is of French origin. By comparison, there is far less evidence of French influence on “core” English syntax. The earliest loanwords were superimposed by the French-speaking new nobility and pertained to administration, law, military terminology, and religion. Cultural prestige was the prime motivation for the later medieval borrowings.
In the following, I will try to sketch the concept of ‘cultural colonialism’ and apply it to the activities of the Germans within the North Atlantic area, focusing on the linguistic aspects and differentiating between continental-Scandinavian and Icelandic. I am convinced that language can be used as a tool of ‘conquest’ quite separate from that of a military campaign, but which does not necessarily have to be less effective. In doing so, I am very aware of the fact that historians have another understanding of ‘colonialism’ and for this reason I prefer to take a sociological approach to the topic. Linguistic contacts are quite complex phenomena and this is not only due to purely linguistic factors – as for example the similarity among languages. Just to give an example, let us consider Estonian, Eesti, a Finno-Ugric language with nothing in common with the Germanic language family. Despite the differences, it happens that this language shows an impressive number of Germanisms from Middle Low German. These occurrences are due to socio-political factors, such as the strong German presence in the region, as well as to the fact that the first extant Estonian book is a bilingual German-Estonian translation of the Lutheran catechism by S. Wandradt and J. Koell, dating to 1535 and published in Wittenberg.1 Indeed, the institute for Estonian language in Tallinn reports that about 25 % of Estonian vocabulary has been influenced by the German language. This gradual influence allegedly occurred in four distinct periods in Estonian history, stretching for about 700 years from the Middle Ages until the Early Modern period.2 Thus, at the beginning of this contribution, it is necessary for me to outline the nature of linguistic contacts first, i.e. some direct and some mediate ones. Afterwards I will explain what I mean by ‘cultural and linguistic colonialism’ and thereby argue, by means of a few examples, the influence of (Middle) Low German on the Scandinavian languages and Icelandic language. Additionally, I will explain, in my opinion, Cultural colonialism as a result of commercial activities: the linguistic perspective
The chapter has three parts. The first part is an introduction to the Mainland Scandinavian languages, with a brief sketch of their history, their relationship to the other Scandinavian languages, and their position among the North Germanic languages. Mainland Scandinavian is treated as one language, since it consists of a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects across Scandinavia. The second part is a presentation of the sources and the origin of the examples used in the book. They are taken from various sources, reference grammars, research literature, the internet, text corpora, and original research. The third part is a presentation of the theoretical background and the descriptive framework, which is generative grammar in its current version, known as ‘minimalism’.
Old Icelandic literature, genetics and historical demography regarding Sámi-Scandinavian early contactsThe spreading of Sámi interference features to the North Germanic languages is confirmed not only by the Old Icelandic sagas, which show us an absolute acceptance of the Sámi in the North Germanic society and marriages between the two nations, but also by the populational genetics that show that the percentage of the “Sámish” haplogroups (Y-DNA N1c, mtDNA U5 and V) among the North Germanic people exceeds considerably the percentage of the modern Sámi population, which indicates a language shift and assimilation of a part of the Sámi (especially of the Southern Sámi). Changes in the population structure caused by two pest pandemics (in the seventh to ninth and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) that affected Northern and Central Scandinavia to a much lesser degree could also contribute both to the spreading of the Sámi genes in Northern and Central Scandinavia and of the Sámi interference features in the North Germanic languages.