Basic research on the influence of German in Upper Sorbian grammar and design of digital archiving of materials

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Upper Sorbian, which is always under the contact situation with German, has many characteristics which is thought to be a result of influence from German. For example, lexical words of German often come to Upper Sorbian conversation. The fact that not only German nouns but also interjections and adverbs may appear is a striking finding. Such German elements are also found in the area of morphology. Upper Sorbian has prefix on verb as in many other Slavonic languages. The peculiar in Upper Sorbian is the fact that German verb prefixes hin- "to", los- "off (to)" and so on are also used: hinpadnyc (hin- + fall) "to fall down", losjec (los- + go) "to set off". Further, in colloquial Upper Sorbian, demonstrative ton "this" and numeral jedyn "one" are used respectively as definite and indefinite articles very often, although the language lacks both articles.The data collected through the field work are electronically stored in the Field Linguist's Toolbox, which is distributed by SIL. The archiving work makes the basis for future research.