| Title: | German „minne” and Arabic minnah (يُح): two of a kind? Comparative studies of the conceptualization of „favoritism” in historical linguistics |
| Author: | Fee-Alexandra Hase |
| Publication: | Diversité et identité culturelle en Europe, XII (1), p. 195 |
| p-ISSN: | 2067-0931 |
| Publisher: | Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2015 |
| Abstract: | Traditionally it is assumed among historical linguists that language families are the main groups of common languages and their ancestors. Identical structural features of cases of words in different language families such as the case we discuss here and their etymological history demonstrate that there are parallels between derived semantic fields of the similar morphological structures of words from different language families. This claim can be considered an argument in favour of the relationship of languages beyond the level of barriers of language families, which are usually considered to be the markers of linguistic difference. The following case study of the conceptualization of ‘favouring‘ in the German and Arabic languages is a case illustrating such a relationship between words, which lead to parallels beyond the traditional language barriers. We are going to discuss here the phonetic and semantic relationship between the Arabic word minnah (يُح) and the Old High German and Middle High German words minna / minme in the context of the socio-cultural function of the common concept of both languages entailing the concept of ‘favouring‘. We conclude that there are genuine similarities between the words, even though the words belong to two different language families (the Germanic languages within the Indo-European language family and the Semitic Afro-asiatic language family), and that in both cases the functioning of the socio-cultural concept of ‘favouring‘ reflected the socio-cultural context of the time at which the authors used the words; in Germanic linguistic documents this concept of ‘favouritism’ is embedded in the context of ‘love’, while the realization of ‘favouritism‘ in Arabic pertains to the economic context of society. |
| Key words: | Historical linguistics, Arabic language, Germanic languages, crosscultural exchange, Arab influence on European literature |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
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