Sponsoring, das

This Anglicism appears to have made a slow entry to Germany, perhaps reflecting the lesser importance of corporate giving and the greater traditional importance of the sovereign's subsidies to education and the arts. Menso Heyl has defended the use of das Sponsoring to describe corporate giving in exchange for business promotion, suggesting in the Hamburger Abendblatt (2007-08-28) that there was no other word in German to express this. He even offered the verb form as well: gesponserte Aktivitäten, from sponsern. More recently it has been plain that das Sponsoring no longer means mere sponsoring and appears to be developing into a general term for both giving and fund-raising. I attended die Sponsoring-Gala of the Sophie Barat School on 2007-09-04, which was in fact nothing more than a fund-raising event. Sponsorship was not invited: the donors were not explicitly offered any contractual opportunity to promote their businesses by quoting the name of the school. The term was then reported in this sense in Die Welt, the Abendblatt and the Hamburger Morgenpost. Capitalized, given neuter gender, pronounced with an uvular -r- and the second -s- as a voiced -z-.