An analysis of the romance words in Joachim Heinrich Campe's wörterbuch zur erklärung und verdeutschung der unserer sprache aufgedrungenen fremden ausdrücke and his success with his germanization program

The research done in this thesis attempted to describe and evaluate Joachim Heinrich Campe's success with his germanization program. His life and the purpose of his germanization program were analysed. A number of Spanish-like loan words Campe attempted to germanize were selected from his dictionary, and looked up in the three major sources of study for this work: Adelung's, Sander's and Drosdowski's dictionaries. These sources helped determine Campe's germanization success. Then, the loan words, Campe's entries, were categorized by part of speech, language of origin, and fields of endeavor to determine what fields they affected the most. These words were also categorized according to Campe's concepts of sinnlich, unsinnlich and Übersinnlich, which were determinants for Campe's way to germanize what he considered foreign words.

It was concluded that Campe was partially successful with his germanization program, but in ways he did not anticipate. His proposed germanizations are part of the German language nowadays as seen in the modern Duden dictionary edited by Drosdowski and the words he intended to replace for the most part remain in the language as synonyms of the germanizations.