HeidelbergCement AG - Vivacon - AG, Labetrunk für Magenleidende - Maaloxan: Unternehmens- und Markennamen zwischen Wirtschaft und Recht: Waren- und Firmennamen und Recht Namen und Recht in Europa / Names and the Law in Europe, Akten der Tagung in Regensburg, 16. und 17. April 2015 / Conference Papers, Regensburg, 16 and 17 April 2015

Contrasting company names such as, e.g., HeidelbergCement AG or Vivacon AG and trademarked brand names for products and services such as, e.g., Labetrunk für Magenleidende (trademarked in 1894) or Maaloxan (a current name for a remedy against stomach complaints) is interesting from the perspective of law, economy and language. On the legal side, there are opposing requirements for the motivation of such names, i.e. for the possibility of inferring characteristics of the company or the product. For product names, motivation should be as low as possible. What would be ideal in this respect would be completely unmotivated, but maximally distinctive “labels” without any relation to other names or other existing words. Company names, in contrast, at least until the change in trade law in the year 1998, had to be strongly motivated with regard to the associates / owners / founders as well as to the object and location of the company. For economic reasons, however, companies prefer medium degrees of motivation for both names types, to a certain extent describing the company and its products positively or at least creating positive associations. The linguistic means available to the name creators for solving this problem are presented in a systematic way in this paper. The data basis is the Waarenzeichenblatt, later Warenzeichenblatt, today Markenblatt, in which since 1894 until the present all newly protected brand names are published. This historical material allows for investigating the use of the relevant linguistic means in brand names from the beginnings until the first decade of the 21st century. With the 21st century and the “Third Reich”, two epochs are in focus which clearly demonstrate the dependence of the linguistic form on extralinguistic factors deriving from the domains of law, politics, economy and societ

The wolf in sheep's clothing: Camouflaged borrowing in Modern German

This article addresses a phenomenon of language contact that has not received much attention in mainstream contact linguistics, namely borrowing via a mechanism Zuckermann (2003) calls MULTISOURCED NEOLOGISATION. Multisourced neologisation is a subtype of Zuckermann's larger class of CAMOUFLAGED BORROWING, and constitutes a special form of calquing in which the calque is phonetically similar to the source language material: It has much in common with folk etymology and is sometimes identified with it, but there are good theoretical reasons to keep the two phenomena apart. Though German is well known for its calquing ability, the application of this special type of calquing has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature as well as in the ongoing public debate over the excessive influx of loanwords. This paper shows that multisourced neologisation is not uncommon in the integration of elements borrowed from English into German, and argues that factors favouring its use include lexical and structural congruities between both languages as well as the relatively high transparency of English to the average speaker of German. Thus, though German does not belong to the protypical language groups using multisourced neologisation that are described by Zuckermann (2003), special circumstances prompt the application of this and other methods of camouflaged borrowing