A Corpus Based Analysis of s.th. is/all water under the bridge

and etw./das ist Schnee von gestern

2

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Origin 4

3. Analysis 5

3.1 Contrastive Analysis 5

3.2 Register 8

3.3 Context 9

4. Conclusion 10

References 11

3

Prince, do not ask in a week

where they are, or in a year.

The only answer you will get is this refrain:

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Francois Villon, 1460

(Translated from French)

1. Introduction

When Francois Villon wrote about the fading beauty of women in his famous poem

Ballad of

the Ladies of Bygone Times

in year 1460, he probably had no idea about how much influence

his poem′s final verse "Mais où sont les neiges d′antan?" would have on the everyday

German language nowadays. Over the years the expression changed into

etw./das ist Schnee

von gestern

and usually describes past events, which are no longer important (Leonhardt 155).

According to the

German-English Dictionary of Idioms

, the English equivalent for the

proverb would be

it/that/s.th. is old hat

. Modern dictionaries1, however, suggest that

s.th.

is/all water under the bridge

is a more common translation. Conspicuously, the outer form of

the two proverbs is very different, yet the image of something running down the river into the

ocean and of snow from the day before which might have already melted by now, have

similar connotations. The aim of this essay is to compare the use of the proverbs

s.th. is/all

water under the bridge

and

etw./das ist Schnee von gestern

in their equivalent language.

Using the extensive data from corpora like ukWaC, the British National Corpus (BNC) and

1 see, for instance: http://www.dict.cc/?s=schnee+von+gestern,

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&sectHdr=on&spellToler=on&chin

ese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=schnee+von+gestern&relink=on