Paronüümide kosmos. Eesti ja saksa keelt kõrvutav käsitlus

Abstract

In Europe and Estonia, linguistic research on paronyms has been rather limited. This article presents a corpus-based comparative study of Estonian and German paronyms, the results of which were included in the German online dictionary ­Paronyme – Dynamisch im Kontrast as a bilingual word entry in the spring of 2023. This is the first German paronym dictionary compiled strictly based on corpus data analysis. The author examined the Estonian words autoritaarne ‘authoritarian’ and autoriteetne ‘authoritative’ by analyzing their collocations. In Estonian, these words have not previously been recognized as paronyms, whereas their German equivalents autoritär ‘authoritarian’ and autoritativ ‘authoritative’ are considered paronyms. In Estonian, the emphasis in defining paronyms is on the differences in form and meaning of the words, while in German, the emphasis is on their similarity. This discrepancy is partly due to the fact that in Estonia, paronyms have been addressed in language planning rather than linguistics, whereas the German dictionary was compiled using corpus linguistic methods. As a result, the contemporary German understanding of paronyms is broader than that in Estonian linguistics and language planning. The study concludes that, in form, Estonian autoritaarne and autoriteetne are similar loanwords with different meanings, which means they could be considered paronyms according to paronym definitions. Ultimately, this comparative linguistic study reveals that the cosmos of (Estonian) paronyms is extensive, yet only a small fraction has been explored so far.

Keywords

• lexicography
• paronyms
• collocations
• estonian
• german
• language planning
• linguistics