The Wendish Research Exchange - Menzel, Thomas: Gender and Word Formation. On Inflection in Sorbian

Lětopis Abstract 2023:The main linguistic strategy by which gender pairing can be determined in the vocabulary of Lower and Upper Sorbian involves examining the etymology of personal terms expressing opposite genders using derivational methods. An attempt is made to establish how far gender pairs of personal terms are present in the lexicography of Sorbian by examining a sample from chronologically close sets of dictionaries of both Sorbian languages. In this process, relatively uniformly treated personal terms from the names of places and their inhabitants, gender-specific nomina attributiva and pejorative/emotional expressions are separated out and compared with a residual group, in which the appearance of gender-paired personal terms occurs many times, seemingly arbitrarily. It turns out that the development of gender-paired dictionary entries does not happen in a linear fashion, and that Upper and Lower Sorbian follow completely different, lexicographical traditions in this respect, which have only come together in recent years with the development of online lexicography. Derivations expressing opposite genders are surprisingly numerous in Pfuhl’s Upper Sorbian-German dictionary of 1866, which can presumably be attributed to the influence of contemporary Czech (or Polish) dictionary models.