Der französische Wortschatz der Waldenser in Deutschland

The present study investigates the vocabulary used in some 1,000 archive documents dating from the period between 1685 and 1735/40 and produced by Waldenses (Vaudois) settling in South-West Germany after their flight from the Val Cluson area. These sources have so far been accorded little attention by Romance language research. Alongside forms specific to the corpus (dialectal forms from the settlers' native area, archaisms), evaluation of the material reveals a large number of findings which represent a genuine enrichment for Gallo-Romance lexicography in general. They yield an abundance of chronological, semantic and other facts concerning over 500 lexemes and their lexical features (meanings, syntagmatic combinations etc.), supplementing and completing the information available in the »FEW« (Wartburg's Etymological Dictionary of French) and other lexicographic sources. In many cases the phenomena in question have, as far as is known, not been recorded anywhere else before.