I'm currently editing the second draft for my preface for "Critical Distance" (expanded edition). I have a hard time to decide what to keep in and what to leave out. I'm trying to create references and associations with the images of the book, and in particular with the cover image. Below is the beginning of the text. If anyone is interested in reading the full draft, please let me know. I would appreciate any feedback and proofreading.When I was searching for a term to describe my rather ambiguous relationship to a geographically, culturally and emotionally defined home, I came across the Dutch word unheimisch. Unheimisch makes me think of “uprooted” or “not at home”, but the Dutch adapted this word from my native language, mistakenly combining unheimlich (“eerie”) and heimisch (“native”, “domestic”, “[at] home”) to describe something as “uncanny”. And even though unheimisch would be such a beautiful and befitting word, it does not exist within the German vocabulary. It is a word that migrated from one language to another without ever having been at home in the former. [...]
4 comments:
Actually, as I understand it, unheimisch is a correct German word but in Germany it fell out of use while the Dutch still use it as a loanword.
If you take an exam in the German language, the word should not be counted as a spelling error while, being an archaic word, it could be considered a style error based on the text.
It seems typical for loanwords to remain unchanged in the language that borrowed it, as it stands alone from the regular style and grammar and does not evolve with it.
Thank you for your comment. If this is indeed the case, then I haven't come across it. Everywhere I read about "unheimisch", in print and on the web, it has been stated that "unheimisch" has been wrongly adapted by the Dutch to mean "uncanny" by mistakenly combining "heimisch" and "unheimlich". If you could provide a source to your claim, I'd be happy to reconsider.
I got it from here http://taaladvies.net/taal/advies/vraag/826/
The site is maintained by the Nederlandse Taalunie (pretty much the authority on Dutch language) and the entry itself says a few things:
- both forms are correct in Dutch, while unheimlich is the usual form in Dutch as well as in German
- unheimisch is based on an outdated version of the word in German, in the sense of: strictly speaking it would be correct but in practice it isn't used anymore.
The direct source cited is: Wahrig, G. (1986). Deutsches Wörterbuch. München: Mosaik.
It is very likely that somewhere after 1986 it was decided to remove the word officially from the German language. This happens every few years with revisions of the official Dutch dictionary (Dikke van Dale), removing words that have fallen out of use and have older spelling.
As for sources, even the latest indirect source named is 10 years old.
Conclusion: you are very likely right but had it been 1986, I would have been :-)
I just looked into an old German dictionary to double-check (Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Hrsg. J.H. Sampe, Braunschweig 1811, Vol.V, p.171--see also Google Books), and it turns out that we are both right and both wrong. "Unheimisch" was indeed used in German, but in the sense of "not at home" or "foreign" (which is the way I understood it in the first place) rather than in the Dutch sense of "uncanny" - a kind of mistaken identity ...
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