Open Access

Peter Meyer

• This paper reports on an ongoing lexicographical project that investigates Polish loanwords from German that were further borrowed into the East Slavic languages Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian. The results will be published as three separate dictionaries in the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a freely available web portal for loanword dictionaries having German as their common source language. On the database level, the portal models lexicographical data as a cross-resource directed acyclic graph of relations between individual words, including German ‘metalemmata’ as normalized representations of diasystemic variants of German etyma. Amongst other things, this technology makes it possible to use the web portal as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’ to find loanwords in different languages borrowed from the same German etymon. The different possible pathways of German loanwords that went through Polish into the East Slavic languages can be represented directly as paths in the graph. A dedicated in-house dictionary editing software system assists lexicographers in producing and keeping track of these paths even in complex cases where, e.g, only a derivative of a German loanword in Polish has been borrowed into Russian. The paper concludes with some remarks on the particularities of the dictionary/portal access structure needed for presenting and searching borrowing chains.