Äquivalente zu lateinisch ante-, prae- und deutsch vorim Sorbischen und Tschechischen aus diachronischer Sicht
Equivalents of Latin ante-, prae- and German vor- in Sorbian and Czech from a Diachronic Viewpoint

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the influence of Latin and German on word formation in Czech and Sorbian. On the example of the prefix před- / pśed- and its equivalents in the contact languages we demonstrate the development of a productive means in the word formation of these Western Slavic languages and confront it with the situation in other Slavic languages. The meaning of the prefix in Sorbian and Czech seems to be adjusted to the meaning of its equivalents in the contact lanuages. In this paper we give an overview over data gained from the corpora Diakorp and Hotko as well as a more detailed analysis of data from the Lower Sorbian corpus Dotko. There is a large number of calques with před- / pśed-, which Sorbian and Czech have in common. Thanks to the Czech corpus as well as dictionaries we can follow the semantic development of derivates borrowed already from Old Church Slavonic or formed during the Old and Middle Czech periods as well as the formation of numerous new calques during the national revival. The data furthermore show some striking differences in the development of Sorbian, where the particle prědk was often used instead of před- / pśed- in older texts. It seems that in Lower Sorbian a complementary distribution of prědk (abstract calques) and pśed- (local and temporal meaning) could have functioned, had there not been the puristic interventions under the influence of Upper Sorbian and Czech National Revival from the end of the 19th century on.

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