English/German Dictionary of Idioms, Supplement to the German/English Dictionary of Idioms

565 Pages·1997·17.03 MB·English

by  Hans Schemann

English - German
Dictionary of Idioms
Erganzungsband
Englisch - Deutsch
English - German
Dictionary of Idioms
Supplement to the
German - English
Dictionary of Idioms
Hans Schemann
Paul Knight
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXI4 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
© 1997 Hans Schemann and Paul Knight
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-17254--3
Contents
PREFACE VII
INTRODUCTION IX
The structure of the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT
Instructions on how to use it
1
ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT .
Preface
I would like to express my gratitude to ROUTLEDGE for the interest it has
shown in this ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT - in particular to Mrs Claire
L'Enfant and to Mrs Sarah Foulkes.
And I am very grateful to Mrs Wendy Morris for her competent, selfless and
untiring support.
Munich, March 1997 Hans Schemann
The ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT is the systematically arranged
»REVERSAL« of the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS.
After the English expression comes the alphabetical headword of the GERMAN
ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS, which is underlined; then comes the German
expression in the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS.
All other information about the German expression - style level, information of
the speakers »attitude«, frequent or rare, neologism or dated etc. - will be found in
the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS.
Introduction
The structure of the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT
Instructions on how to use it
The ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT is the result of »reversing« the equi
valents in the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS.
Paul Knight »translated« the 35000 or so German idioms into 64000 English
equivalents - whenever possible using English idioms, otherwise using non-idio
matic lexemes and lexeme combinations which would be used in the English con
text. In some instances, however, he had to use paraphrases.
These 64000 examples do not, of course, constitute 64000 different units. Iden
tical English equivalents are used for numerous (contextual) synonyms, quasi-sy
nonyms and other German expressions which are closely related semantically. I
have not worked out the number of different equivalents, but on the basis of
extensive sampling I would estimate that the total number of English idioms ranges
from 12000 to 16000 - as against a German corpus of 35000.
On the basis of this information we can draw a first conclusion about the
structure of the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT: as the »translation« for the
most part contains commonly used and widely known idioms as opposed to rare
idioms which are »marked« according to groups of speakers or which are dated or
otherwise marginal, we can state that this dictionary of idioms probably reflects the
core of the current English idiomatic repertoire, in so far as this is »captured« from
a German perspective, i. e. excluding that segment of the English idiomatic corpus
which is not recoverable through translation from German. How large this seg
ment is and what lexematic areas it covers is a question of contrastive linguistics
which could be answered by comparing our idiomatic material with an exhaustive
contemporary monolingual English dictionary of idioms.
In short, this ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT condenses or compresses the
German material.
This leads to a further and in my view extremely important aspect of the
ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT: for many English expressions the user will
find numerous, and in many cases very numerous, German translation alternatives,
i. e. those for which Paul Knight chose an identical equivalent. There are problably
few other English-German dictionaries that contain anything like this wealth of
equivalents. To gain a picture of this the user need only study those sections of the
dictionary where alphabetical English entries are as it were interrupted by German
idioms demarcated from each other by a small rhombus (.). The layout of the
ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT further underlines this feature.
By this way, we have built into this bilingual dictionary a thesaurus which
places a particular emphasis on certain semantic fields. A detailed study of these
areas would be extremely illuminating both from a monolingual and from a bilin
gual perspective.
Introduction x
It is important to bear in mind that the German equivalents for the English
expressions are not »translations« from English. On the contrary, they constitute
the source units or starting points by means of which the English expressions can
be located. On the one hand these apparent translations, as source units, are ap
propriate, authentic, precise and »nuanced«; on the other hand they of course
relate to the example context in which they are found. This means that a more or
less great divergence may exist between their meaning and what is regarded as the
semantic core or »standard« meaning of the English expression. The »perspective«
is primarily a German and only secondarily an English one.
In all cases where the user asks: are the German equivalents appropriate for a
given English idiom our advice is: consult the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY
OF IDIOMS and study the example context. If the user follows this advice - and it
is only necessary to do so in cases where the linguistic competence or linguistic
feeling of the user cannot resolve uncertainties -, then he will find the ENGLISH
GERMAN SUPPLEMENT extremely informative compared with other dictionaries.
For any given English expression he will find not a »translation« or a »paraphrase«
but the German expression which a German native speaker would spontaneously
use in the given context - anQ furthermore in many cases with numerous alterna
tives. In other words, the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT provides the infor
mation that a user, starting out from an English expression, would obtain if he
consulted German texts in which the lexematic combinations corresponding to the
English expression appear. The example context constitute these texts.
All these features mean that the user who follows our advice will quickly and
reliably be able to gain an overview of the variety of »genuine« German equiva
lents to which a given English idiomatic expression leads. This incidentally opens
up perspectives for contrastive linguistics and for synonym studies which up to
now have hardly been perceived, let alone dealt with in any detail. This is partly
because there was a lack of material whose organisation and scope would suffire
for such analyses and partly because the »variation« between source language -
target language perspective is underdeveloped in applied linguistics (and indeed in
language teaching).
- Accuracy and appropriateness of the German equivalents
- translational appropriateness
- Variety of German equivalents
- translational range, thesaurus function
- text-related precision of the German equivalents
- translational precision, clear context-relatedness
these are the distinguishing features of the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT in
terms of the »illustration« of the »idiomatic relation« between English and Ger
man. In this sense this ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLEMENT is, as far as I know, an
innovation in lexicography.
A further innovation - from a monolingual, purely English perspective - is the
clearly structured presentation of English idioms down to the finest detail.
The first principle of presentation is based on the categories noun - verb -
adjective - adverb - other, i. e. from each individual English idiom the alphabeti
cally relevant lemma was chosen according to this sequence of categories. Accor
ding to this lemma, the first sorting of the 64000 entries was done. In those in
stances where a clear allocation was not possible - this applies especially to the
XI Introduction
equivalent series frequently used by Paul Knight ~, I used a system of multiple
entries, i. e. the expression was listed under all appropriate lemmata. This means
that the user can find the English expressions easily and does not need to chase
cross-references.
The lemma appears in thick print ~ as the »title« of a »block of idioms«. In the
GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS the headwords, which also appear
in thick print, have the same function as the alphabetically relevant headwords.
The arrangement of idiomatic expressions according to lemmata is nothing
new. Most idiomatic dictionaries use this system, some with a continuous reference
~ or implicit reference ~ to the lemmata in the main section of the book, others in a
supplement, some in both. The only question is what criteria are used to establish
lemmata, whether those criteria are clear-cut and whether they are consistently
applied.
What is completely new is the second level of arrangement of entries in the
dictionaries which have been lexicologically defined and edited by me, i. e. the
specific subalphabetisation of the extremely numerous idiomatic units and patterns
which have an identical defining lemma.
The combination of the two levels makes the ENGLISH-GERMAN SUPPLE
MENT the most specific dictionary of English idioms and phraseology in the widest
sense (i. e not only in the strict sense of »idiomatic« but equally in terms of syn
tactically »irregular« lexematic combinations). The user who looks up lemmata
such as matter, hand, foot, to get, to think and numerous other headwords, at the
same time bearing the different syntactic structures in mind, will immediately rea
lise the advantages of systematic arrangement. The ENGLISH-GERMAN SUP
PLEMENT from this perspective is a context monography of the idiomatically and
phraseologically relevant lexemes of English ~ a monography which provides an
extremely rapid and clear overview over extremely extensive material and which
combines the genuineness, variation and many-sidedness of the German equiva
lents with highly detailed English idiomatic corpus. (In this respect it has features
in common with number of learners dictionaries developed in recent years.)
I have explained the alphabetisation scheme and the principles on which it is
based at length in the GERMAN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS. To help the
user to look up idioms in this SUPPLEMENT, I have listed the main criteria again
here:
I. Primary Arrangement: the categories
The order is as follows:
1. noun jn. in den Himmel heben
2. verb blau machen, zu kurz kommen
3. adjective fertig sein, todmiide sein
4. adverb an und fUr sich, per se
5. pronouns, interjections, particles, etc.