GERMAN LOANWORDS IN SERBIAN, IN GERMAN AND SLAVIC COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND ĐORĐE LEBOVIĆ'S NOVEL SEMPER IDEM

Abstract

As can be seen from the title, this paper has three goals: (1) to present the most prominent features of German loanwords in modern Serbian (along with basic concepts of contact linguistics), (2) to provide a brief survey of most recent linguistic research into German words in Serbian, and (3) to analyze the features and use of German loanwords in the novel Sepmer idem written by Đorđe Lebović, an eminent Serbian 20th-21st century author.

Therefore, this paper has three main parts. The first one is about the classification of foreign words into loanwords and calques, and the classification of German words into substantial, international and structural, about their adaptation in terms of Serbian orthography, pronunciation and morphology, its lexical needs, direct and indirect borrowing etc. The second one deals with current research into German words conducted by Serbian and German scholars, while the focus is on two studies: "Nemački uticaji u našem jeziku" by professor Miloš Trivunac, one of the founders of German studies at university level, and "Germanismen im Serbischen und Kroatischen" by B. Golubović, a modern Slavic scholar (Golubović 2007). The third part of the paper analyzes German loanwords in Đorđe Lebović's prose.

Since many young linguists and students find German influence on Serbian is very interesting, and many of them decide to write term papers and MA theses in this field, the author tried to summarize basic information about this topic offered by ample literature in Serbian and German, to present them in a clear an meaningful way and to point out the possibilities for the application of these data when analyzing the corresponding aspect of certain literary texts in Serbian by using examples from Lebović's texts. Depending on what a particular work of literature offers, results of such an analysis can prove the current insights or even make them more profound.