Wissensvermittlung durch Substantivkomposita im frühmittelalterlichen Kloster

In my dissertation project I propose a linguistic approach to nominal compounds from a cultural perspective. The role of nominal compounds in knowledge transfer in the early medieval monastic school is at the center of this research, which analyzes material from Notker III's didactic German language adaptions of Latin school texts. The purpose of this paper is to show how Notker makes use of nominal compounds when translating from Latin to German, especially where new words have to be found for ideas or concepts not previously expressed in German. First I will give a short introduction to the material and an overview of general properties of nominal compounds as the object of research. The following section presents the theoretical background of cultural analysis. It also provides a semiotic definition of culture, according to which culture is seen as the shared models for perceiving, relating and interpreting among members of a social group and knowledge transfer is described as a form of cultural transfer. Finally, I analyze four examples of the role of nominal compounds in passages that impart theological ideas and interpretations, or in which translations of technical terms are needed in order to comprehend what these terms denote