Re: CHAT: German help

The Germans seem to have developed the best on-line dictionaries for foreign
use, and I go to two sources: LEO's Deutsch-Englisch site:
http://dict.leo.org/ which gives you the definition and
declension/conjugation of nouns and verbs, and the excellent site at TU
Chemnitz: http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/ that gives you a kind of concordance,
where you see the word in many different contexts.  Together, these beat
leafing through the huge Langenscheidt and straining your hands and eyes.
But they aren't perfect.  In neither one could I find "Gebrauchsspurig," for
neither of them break the word down into parts for you.  You have to do that
yourself, and I was going to suggest something having to do with "used" as
well, "on the outside."  But Spur evaded me, with all its meanings. :(  Good
to know about GERTWOL.

Interesting about the -ig ending, which I took to be adjectival.  I wonder
if it is archaic?

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julia "Schnecki" Simon" <helicula@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 12:45 AM
Subject: Re: CHAT: German help


> Hello!
>
> On 6/30/06, Ph.D. <phil@...> wrote:
>> I'm looking at a German used books website.
>>
>> Can somebody (preferably a German-speaker) tell
>> me what "aussen gebrauchsspurig" means?
>> Babelfish doesn't know the second word.
>
> I wouldn't have recognized the word either if you hadn't given the
> context (used books). ;-)
>
> _Außen_, of course, means "outside", but you probably already knew
> that.
>
> The word _gebrauchsspurig_ is an adjective derived from
> _Gebrauchsspur_ "trace (or evidence) of use". So, the book in question
> doesn't look new but... well... used, but apparently only on the
> outside (außen).
>
> And I'm not surprised that Babelfish doesn't know the word... I am
> surprised, though, that Babelfish didn't attempt to translate its
> components (or, knowing Babelfish, any substrings it could find in its
> lexicon) to come up with something that doesn't make any sense in
> *any* language. ;-)
>
> To my delight, GERTWOL (http://www2.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/gertwol) does
> recognize the word. It doesn't seem to be in the GERTWOL lexicon,
> because in that case the clearly wrong analysis with _geb-_ as first
> element shouldn't appear, but at least it also gives the correct
> analysis. :-)
>
> This type of adjective formation (N+ig meaning "having N", e.g.
> _löchrig_ "holey" or _rothaarig_ "red-haired") isn't uncommon, but
> it's not productive anymore, so an unknown word ending in -ig is much
> more likely to confuse you than an unknown word ending in, say, -ung.
> (When I was 14 or so, we had a lot of fun "reviving" some obsolescent
> and obsolete forms for our own "group language". One of the things we
> liked to do was attach -ig to just about anything; we would say things
> like "er ist zuspätkommig" for "he is (running) late". Needless to say
> that in "proper" German, this suffix only attaches to very few verb
> stems, and certainly not productively...)
>
> Regards,
> Julia 8-)
>
> --
>   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
> _@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
> si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
>                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)
>

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