Schnauze
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Upon seeing that word for the first time, I had only the vaguest idea of what it meant, though I suspected that it was closely related to the dog breed name:
breed of terrier with a bearded muzzle, 1923, from German Schnauzer, literally "growler," from schnauzen "to snarl, growl," from Schnauze "snout, muzzle," which is related to Middle English snute, snoute "snout" (see snout).
Next, I thought that surely it must be the German cognate of Yiddish schnoz[z] ("nose"), and that was unmistakably clear from the nickname and protuberant proboscis of Jimmy Durante (1893-1980), who often jocularly referred to his own nose as the schnozzola (Italianization of the American Yiddish slang word schnoz.
Today I learned a completely new meaning for "Schnauze" from this entertaining, informative article by Joe Bour on BBC.com (12/5/22):
…
Berlin's beloved (and loathed) local dialect: Berliners have a reputation for being generally cold, outspoken and rude. It's lovingly called the "Berliner Schnauze", and how you feel about it depends on your perspective.
…
On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin. In reality, it's a visceral dialect merged with working-class attitude and influences from French and Yiddish that can be as polarising as it is varied.
Dr Peter Rosenberg, a West Berlin-born linguist whose familiarity with Berliner Schnauze comes from years of study and lived experience, describes it as a "schlagfertig", or quick-witted linguistic game. He says that it's the colloquial language of Berlin – the spark behind a comment or the way you respond to a situation.
Sure, there are differences in pronunciation, grammar and syntax between Berliner Schnauze and Hochdeutsch, or High German (the standard German spoken throughout the country). For example, the Berliner Schnauze uses a "j" where High German uses a "g". So gut (good) becomes jut. But most don't think about grammar and syntax when it comes to Berliner Schnauze. It's an attitude that's entirely based on a situation.
…
Descriptions of Berliner Schnauze increased in the 19th Century as High German grew in usage. According to Rosenberg, Berliner Schnauze was lambasted as a primitive form of language along with other German dialects like Niederdeutsch, or Low German. The criticisms were varied, and critics played up the supposed rough nature of Berliners. During the Berlin Wall era, Berliner Schnauze was more common in Communist East Berlin, seen by many in the upper echelons of West Berlin society as a language of the underclass.
…
Not everyone's Berliner Schnauze story comes with a rude bark, however. Rosenberg, for instance, has fond memories of Berliner Schnauze, including one that dates to his time playing on the company football team. Most of the players were "Handwerker" or manual labourers of some kind, and Rosenberg was the only academic on the team. His teammates would often ask him what he did as an academic and finish with the question, "Musst du da morgen wieder hin?" (Do you have to go back there tomorrow?).
Rosenberg explained that this formulation of the question was a Berliner Schnauze way of saying, "What you do is completely superfluous."
"It was really nicely packed," smiled Rosenberg. "Nobody said, 'nobody needs linguistics' or 'intellectuals are strange people'. They just nicely asked, 'Do you have to go back there tomorrow?' That's very typical."
…
It was common in the town where I grew up — East Canton, Osnaburg Township, Stark County, northeast Ohio — to call someone with a big nose "schnoz". I knew the term well from a very young age.
Etymological addendum
16th century, from Middle Low German snûte, whence also the later doublet Schnute (“pouting mouth”). Further from Old Saxon *snūt, from Proto-West Germanic *snūt (“snout”). Cognate with Dutch snuit, whence probably English snout.
The forms Schnauße and somewhat later Schnauze are artificial adaptions to High German consonantism, probably under the influence of schnäuzen (“to blow one’s nose”), from Proto-West Germanic *snūtijan. An original High German cognate, albeit with a different stem formation, is at hand in Central Franconian Schnüss, Hunsrik Schniss, Luxembourgish Schnëss.
(source)
Selected readings
- "English is a Dialect of Germanic; or, The Traitors to Our Common Heritage" (9/4/13)
- "Ich bin ein Hongkonger" (7/18/19)
[h.t. June Teufel Dreyer]
Ross Presser said,
December 28, 2022 @ 9:39 am
We have used the term "schnauzing" for many years to signify what dogs do when they rub their snouts against furniture, or the floor, to clean them after eating, or because they're itchy, or for whatever reason dogs do what they do. We've never had an actual Schnauzer but our Brussels Griffons, with their prominent beards, habitually did this after every meal and at many other times too.
Phillip Helbig said,
December 28, 2022 @ 10:46 am
Yes, a new meaning, but of course related to the meaning of snout, which can include the mouth as well as the nose, since the mouth is where speech comes from.
Somewhat related: Berliner Du: using the familiar second-person pronoun and/or verb form with the last name (“Meyer, kannst du die Leiter halten?“). It is definitely part of the berliner Schnauze. Hamburger Sie: the opposite, using the polite second-person pronound and/or verb form with the first name (“Jens, möchten Sie etwas trinken?“). Helmut Schmidt was a fan, famously using the familiar form only with his wife (at least in public; probably with mistresses as well).
S. Norman said,
December 28, 2022 @ 11:09 am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4_vLKuNVBk
Juju & Said – Berliner Schnauze
S. Norman said,
December 28, 2022 @ 11:14 am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3dqU7msGU8
MyKey Berlin – Berliner Schnauze
There's more, but for me, one was enough
Coby said,
December 28, 2022 @ 12:18 pm
Halt die Schnauze is a common way of saying "shut up".
Schnauze (or Maul) is to Mund (mouth) more or less as fressen is to essen (to eat).
David Marjanović said,
December 28, 2022 @ 12:56 pm
It is often shortened to just Schnauze! – compare French Ta guele ! and, one step farther away, La ferme !.
Precisely not, no. The affricate – z instead of ß – can only come from a long *tt, never from a short *t between two vowels. The Proto-West-Germanic form must have been *snūttjan; at some point the expected Proto-Germanic *snūtijaną (automatic *i inserted to prevent overlong syllables: Sievers's law), if it already existed, must have been remade to *snūtjan(ą) at some point between Proto-Germanic and Proto-West-Germanic. There is already evidence from a bunch of loanwords into Finnic that Sievers's law had ceased to operate at some point before Proto-Northwest-Germanic; words coined after that point (*-ja- remained productive long after) did not get the automatic *-i-, and some older ones that had it were probably remade without it. Unfortunately the Finnic evidence is all in a chapter by a Uralicist in a book about Finnic, so most Germanicists have probably never seen it even though the book came out in 1986. It's somewhere on Google Books, but I don't have time to look for it right now.
This loss created a large number of overlong syllables. Yet more were created by West Germanic consonant stretching (in this case *snūtjan > *snūttjan) and by the High German consonant shift (which turned short plosives into long fricatives, which would have been *t > ß). Within Old High German times, overlong syllables were abolished by the shortening of long consonants that followed long syllable nuclei (indeed that's why the letter ß exists) – but this never happened in the Alemannic and the Bavarian dialects, and because the sound systems of Standard German are all to some degree based on those of the dialects of the region, schlafen "sleep" retains /aːfː/ even in Austrian Standard German. But I digress. :-)
Aristotle said,
December 28, 2022 @ 1:08 pm
In fact in German I’ve never heard it used as a reference to solely the nose. “Muzzle” or “snout” is the English word I’d use to translate it, and of course that straightforwardly fits into “Berliner Schnauze” also.
Considering what similarly used English slang expressions fit “shut your X”, naming a dialect after that term as in “Berliner Schnauze” is kind of like if people from those places said they speak e.g. “Chicago Piehole” or “Boston Trap”.
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2022 @ 3:44 pm
My father and people in his cohort used to say "shut your trap!"
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2022 @ 3:48 pm
In Nepali, insofar as I recall, it was "chup lag", "chup lagnu चुप लाग्नु", and "chup lagnu hos" — with increasing levels of politeness.
If you want to be truly peremptory, you can just say "chup!". By itself, "chup" means "silence; quiet; shush".
"Lagnu लाग्नु" is a sort of all purpose verb (like Mandarin dǎ 打 ["strike; hit"]), with the following, among other) meanings:
to be attached to, to cling to
to strike, to hit
to be sharp
to happen, to proceed
to begin, to set off
to feel
David Marjanović said,
December 28, 2022 @ 3:52 pm
Berliner Schnauze does not refer to the moribund dialect. It refers to a mode of expression: coarse humor (similar to Wiener Schmäh, which is a kind of deadpan snark) and brutal honesty provided unasked.
Stephen Bowden said,
December 28, 2022 @ 4:08 pm
All cognate with “snut” which is Swedish slang for a cop.
martin schwartz said,
December 28, 2022 @ 4:49 pm
There is no Yiddish word "schnoz(z), i.e. /šnaz/
or any */šnVz/ pertaining to noses or snouts. The only vaguely similar (and irrelevant) word in Yiddish pertaining to the nose
is /(zix) (oys)šnaytsn/ 'to blow one's nose', cognate with English
snot. I don't know of a Yiddish cognate of Schnauze, but havent checked. David L. Gold, who has commented on LL, has pointed
out ,among his publications, English words with initial sh- clusters which some think of Yiddish origin but are not.
Peter Schultz said,
December 28, 2022 @ 8:24 pm
There is a remarkably long list of English words that refer in some way to the nose: snoot, snout, sniff, snivel, snot, snoop, snub, snifter, snore, sneer, sneeze, snort, snuff…
David L. Gold said,
December 28, 2022 @ 9:09 pm
Whether Yidish played a role in the ermergence, later development, or both of American English shnoz is unclear. The only theoretically possible Yidish etymon appears to be שנויץ (shnoyts) 1. ‘muzzle, snout [of an animal, for example, a pig]’. 3. ‘bow, prow, stem [of a ship]’.
Before deciding whether to be less unsure of that possible etymology, one would want to see the dates of the earliest-known uses of the English word and how many of them showed a connection of one kind or another with Ashkenazic Jews.
David L. Gold said,
December 28, 2022 @ 9:44 pm
“Yiddish schnoz[z] ("nose")” and “the American Yiddish slang word schnoz” appear to be unevidenced.
~flow said,
December 29, 2022 @ 5:19 am
I've definitely heard youtuber Adam Ragusea saying "shnoz" (meaning mouth), so I know it's a thing; and then the *Jiddisches Wörterbuch" by R. Lötzsch (Mannheim: Dudenverl. 1992) has (p156) has "schnojz" and "schnuk" for "Rüssel" (trunk of the elephant, but also slang for "nose").
David Marjanović said,
December 29, 2022 @ 7:13 am
And of the pig.
That's "shnoyts", though, not "s(c)hnoz(z)"…
~flow said,
December 29, 2022 @ 8:58 am
@David Marjanović—just collecting some data points here but you're right about the orthography which should be pointed out. Then again there's quite a number of German/adjacent words in American English that have become to be read with [z] because they're written with 〈z〉, so although [ʃnautsə] is sort-of far from [ʃnɔz ~ ʃnɒz], Americans reading 〈schnauze〉 as [ʃnɔz] or [ʃnɒz] is plausible IMHO.
Victor Mair said,
December 29, 2022 @ 10:03 am
As I pointed out above, when I was growing up in northeast Ohio, people all around me said "schnoz" for "[big / remarkable] nose". It had to come from somewhere. By the time I was in my late teens, the more "learned" among them (such as band directors who used words like "schmaltz[y]") ascribed it to Yiddish influence. Now that prompts me to write a separate post on "schmaltz", because it had a big influence / impact on me that has lasted until today, siix decades later.
Victor Mair said,
December 29, 2022 @ 10:20 am
My Dad had a schnoz, many of my friends and neighbors had schnozzes, and some people said I had a schnoz too.
Lasius said,
December 29, 2022 @ 1:22 pm
Moribund? When did that happen? Just at this christmas' family gathering I heard young children speaking it.
ulr said,
December 29, 2022 @ 4:00 pm
Berlin dialect? I cannot remember ever having heard that; at best a certain Berlin accent (replacing "ich" with "ick(e)" and monophthongising /ae/ and /ao/ to /e:/ and /o:/), and it's been twenty years since I heard a reasonably young person from Berlin actually using this accent. For me the defining feature of "Berliner Schnauze" is working class irreverence.
~flow said,
December 29, 2022 @ 5:53 pm
Hörn se mal, Herr oda Frau ulr, so könnse mir nich komm, Berlinerisch als Akßent ßu beßeichnen. Kieken se mal uff Wikipehdja nach, da sehn se Dialekt, Metrolekt, Stadtmundart anjebotn. Akßent is wenn jemant nich richtich rehn kann, und Dialekt is wenn fiele Leute nich so rehn wie inn Fernsehn bein Nachrichtnferkündjen, aber all untananda so in etwa jleich. Akßent, hörn se mal, ick hab doch keen Sprachfeler nich! Schön Tach noch sonst.
martin schwartz said,
December 30, 2022 @ 1:49 am
Preemptively: Wiktionary takes "schmaltz" from either Yiddish or German. In real Yiddish shmalts means, like the German, animal
fat or lard. I heard it most in NY Yiddish for liquid chicken fat (cf. Wiktionary,
"unaccounted"), excess flab, and as adj. for a fatty kind of
herring. Note Wiktionary's "doublets":
smalt, smalto, and email [sic!]. The latter: what?? email < *esmail
vel sim., like emerald from Old French esmeraude? (Hmm, can one use *eémail for an electronic letter transmitted on enamel?)
Vanya said,
December 30, 2022 @ 8:30 am
Berliner Schnauze does not refer to the moribund dialect. It refers to a mode of expression:
Exactly right, and the example quoted ( "Musst du da morgen wieder hin?" ) is standard Hochdeutsch.
David – when you say moribund dialect – are you referring to Märkisches Plattdeutsch? It doesn’t seem like Berlin has had a native „dialect“ for the past two hundred years, just a succession of mesolects.
Of course soon standard German will be the „native dialect“ in a city where most of the population will use English as their primary language in daily life.
David Marjanović said,
December 30, 2022 @ 1:55 pm
I think (!) I'm referring to ~flow's beautiful sample – which is probably just the previous mesolect.
Although I live in Berlin, I don't get out much, and then mostly on English-speaking occasions, so the fact that I've encountered the lect ~flow presented only in literature and never heard it doesn't mean terribly much. I've heard various features of that lect, yes, but most of them seem to be lexicalized.
Well. Standard German is underdefined. The vocabulary and even the grammar give you plenty of synonyms to pick and choose. Currently, both the actual sounds that are used to fill in the abstract sound system, and the (plural!) sound systems themselves, are derived from a compromise between the spelling and the dialects of the region all over the German-speaking area, even when the dialects are extinct; of course they've been converging over the centuries, especially the 20th, and the limits that are felt to be set by the spelling have been becoming tighter*, but that still leaves a lot of variation and will continue to do so throughout the – short – foreseeable future.
* Most striking may be the complete disappearance of [ɣ] from anything that counts as standard during the 20th century, despite the fact that it's widespread across Central and Low German and the fact that its syllable-final fortition to /x/ instead of /k/ is widespread in northern and central mesolects and, in -ig, is a stable feature of most Standard accents and even the very tightly prescribed stage pronunciation. I didn't know [ɣ] existed – like, I didn't know any such sound existed in human language – before I found it described in a dictionary of Greek when I was maybe 20; it blew my mind.
David Marjanović said,
December 30, 2022 @ 1:57 pm
I hate it when I click "submit" too early…
English in public and Russian in more intimate settings seems like a pretty good bet.
Lasius said,
December 30, 2022 @ 3:17 pm
English in public and Russian in more intimate settings seems like a pretty good bet.Is ditt een Witz den ick nich so richtich fasteh?
Yves Rehbein said,
December 31, 2022 @ 11:03 am
*Schnauzer* is also short for *Schnautzbart*, which is an equally good description of the dog, which Wikipedia is describing as "characterised by an abundant bristly beard and moustache". They indicate that the name is old and "how it came to be applied to the breed is unknown.[6]: 482", citing Räber, Enzyklopädie der Rassehunden (2001 [1993]). The proper pronounciation is trimoraic
*Rex* as the prototype of a dog name follows a similar idea, cp. *riechen* "to smell, sense", *to reak*, similar to *Snoopy* (rather than a mean stinker), thus showing how liky contamination from a prestige language is, as for Latin *rex* "king", potentially undoing sound change by later borrowing (as *Henry, Heinrich, Hendrik* << \*Haimarīks shows, nativized vocabulary ought to shift). In this view it's not necessary to derive from \*snūttjan although that's more convincing than anything if a prestigious West-Germanic language like Frankish took it on. Since palatalization is a common occurance, it could be a doublet of *hound* very well, or of *genus*, or *cunning* if leaning on the BBC article raising "quick-witted". However, Old English *cnēowe* "knee; a generation, relationship" is a bit of a stretch.
David Marjanović said,
December 31, 2022 @ 12:48 pm
Just going off the languages I hear on the subway. :-)
More to my previous point, I've heard det pretty often in Berlin, and I've seen dit written, but I've heard it at most once.
Schnauzbart of course.
I really can't imagine anyone associates Rex, with -[ɛk]-, with riechen "smell"*, which has -[iːç]-. Rex isn't contaminated by Latin, it's simply an unassimilated Latin loan.
* Including "reek", but never "sense", unlike French sentir which covers both.
Sorry for the confusion – I was talking about where the verb sich schnäuzen "blow one's nose" comes from.
Completely impossible. The great discovery of historical linguistics, the one that turned it from an art into a science, was that sound shifts do not happen to random words at random. This discovery was made in the mid-late 19th century.
Victor Mair said,
December 31, 2022 @ 6:30 pm
From an octogenarian friend whose father was the reputed inventor of the submarine snorkel and has many other military engineer inventions to his credit — albeit for the 'other' side:
=====
I understand that the word Schnorkle was assigned to the system that my father perfected for the submarine. The word apparently means a person's large nose which is not clean.
=====
From Wikipedia:
=====
A submarine snorkel is a device which allows a submarine to operate submerged while still taking in air from above the surface. British Royal Navy personnel often refer to it as the snort. A concept devised by Dutch engineers, it was widely used on German U-boats during the last year of World War II and known to them as a Schnorchel.
=====
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_snorkel
David Marjanović said,
January 1, 2023 @ 12:56 pm
Interesting. I haven't encountered any meaning of Schnorchel other than "snorkel", but "a person's large nose which is not clean" is plausible given the verb schnarchen "snore" and given the fact that the word looks much older than the meaning could possibly be.
tsts said,
January 1, 2023 @ 11:38 pm
There is an older established word "schnorgel" in Northern German:
From https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/schnorgel
schnorgel, schnörgel, schnurgel, f.
nase, mund, schnauze; schnorgel, m. unreife, vorlaute person, die überall die schnorgel hineinsteckt, mitredet ….
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. Lfg. 8 (1896), Bd. IX (1899), Sp. 1378, Z. 2.
Given the closeness to Dutch, one might expect a similar word that may have been reused by the Dutch inventors of the snorkel, and that might be pronounced more like a "ch"?
~flow said,
January 2, 2023 @ 1:11 am
@tsts Given the closeness to Dutch, one might expect a similar word that may have been reused by the Dutch inventors of the snorkel, and that might be pronounced more like a "ch"?
The more parsimonious explanation would be that the letter <g> does not unambiguously encode the sound [ɡ]; rather, one must always suspect that in north German contexts it may also stand for [ɣ, x] (as it does in most cases in modern Dutch), and also [ç] where the lect in question does have the sound. Sometimes you see texts with <g> used for some and <gh> used for other words as seen in the text that graces the shield of the Roland of Bremen, cf https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremer_Roland#Bedeutung ; whether that is done consistently within single texts, thus likely indicating a difference in pronunciation is not clear to me.
~flow said,
January 2, 2023 @ 1:44 am
@David Marjanović The great discovery of historical linguistics, the one that turned it from an art into a science, was that sound shifts do not happen to random words at random. This discovery was made in the mid-late 19th century.
But how likely is this the case when looking at the big picture? I'd venture to say it was not so much a discovery (thus, a proven fact) on part of the Neogrammarians; rather, what the discovered was that they could explain a good many plausible correspondences for a good many words for a number of related languages using the hypothesis that "all sounds of all words behave in lawful manners" and by actually formulating those "laws" explicitly.
That was indeed a great advancement but it does not follow that we can always formulate those laws for all cases without restricting some of those laws to a narrow group of words whose sound shapes do not differ from the divergent history of other, otherwise similar words. This, at least, is my takeaway from a recent re-reading of a 1965 booklet "Historische Neuenglische Laut- und Formenlehre"; I seem to remember the prominent case of some phonetic processes which went like waves through the vocabulary and across the dispersed population which came to a halt before a 100% of the dominant dialect got converted from the older to the newer form, thus leaving behind a mixture of pronunciations for words that can not be explained without listing them.
Secondly, considering the number of laws that are postulated e.g. for the development of English over the past few hundred years I cannot see what would keep people from making (subconscious) contradictory choices in the face of contradicting rules if there happened to be any, and why shouldn't those exist at least in places like London where people from all over the country and beyond congregated?
Likewise, I cannot predict with any certainty whether a given long [i:] has become [ai:] or [e:] in the Berlin dialect (or whatchamaycallit) (indeed, usages vary) and whether a final [-s] has or has not become [-t] there.
So, yes, if everything in the world (with the exception of quantum effects) is the effect of some cause, then sound shifts do not happen to random words at random will of course hold, but it would be overly optimistic to think that such processes can be explained by looking at sound patterns only and without admitting that such processes can be chaotic, thus essentially unpredictable or even unreconstructible (as for their precise causes).
Yves Rehbein said,
January 2, 2023 @ 3:17 am
> I really can't imagine anyone associates Rex, with -[ɛk]-, with riechen "smell"*, which has -[iːç]-. Rex isn't contaminated by Latin, it's simply an unassimilated Latin loan.
> * Including "reek", but never "sense", unlike French sentir which covers both.
Low German had maintained rēken and with the appropriate semantics, according to DWDS.de.
By the way, Yddish נאָז (noz) is good fit for the topic, modulo some contracted prefix, which is most likely not from the hypothetical doublette to Hund that might underly Schnauzer (eg. Armenian šun).
Juten Rutsch weiterhin, wa
David Marjanović said,
January 2, 2023 @ 12:27 pm
Fair enough, yes.
That was controversial for decades, but seems not to exist. Rather, the same sound change can have different conditioning factors in different dialects; morphological analogy can work immediately, destroying the regular outcome of a sound change before the regular outcome even surfaces; and sometimes, especially in large cities like London or Berlin or Beijing, you get dialect mixture with truly chaotic outcomes of a few selected things.
But to postulate a randomly palatalized doublet of hound on no further evidence and ascribe it to such a reason would be way too unparsimonious to take seriously.
I'm not aware of any cases where [i:] has become [e:]; can you give me an example? Words where ei is [e:] (eene kleene) are completely regular: the "old ei" (Proto-Germanic [ai], e.g. Old and Middle High German ei) and the "new ei" (Proto-Germanic through MHG [i:]) have merged in Standard German, but not, to the best of my knowledge, in any German dialect. In mine they're [a] and [ɛi] respectively (vowel length isn't phonemic but depends on stress). The "old ei" seems to be [e:] throughout Low and Central German.
"Old ei" words with [e:] in the current mesolect of Berlin are rare and probably best considered loans from the dialect.
Similarly, High German -[s] is the result of a merger; Low German keeps the two sources apart as -[s] and -[t]. Here, too, the words with -[t] in the current mesolect of Berlin are probably best considered loans from the dialect.
That's simply Nase "nose" as opposed to the unrelated Schnauze. A Schnauzer is a Schnauz-er, someone with a Schnauze = snout.
KeithB said,
January 3, 2023 @ 9:32 am
I have to share this joke I heard Steve Lawrence tell *many* years ago:
A woman went to the vet, and he told her to get some depilatory cream (Nair) to remove some problematic hairs.
She goes to the drug store:
"I need some cream to remove unwanted hair"
"This works fine madam, but if you use it on your legs you should not wear fine hose for a day or so."
"Oh, its not for my legs"
"In that case, on your arms you should avoid fine silk blouses for a few days."
"No, no, it is for my schnauzer!"
"In that case, madam, I wouldn't ride a bike for a week!"
Yves Rehbein said,
January 14, 2023 @ 3:46 pm
> But to postulate a randomly palatalized doublet of hound on no further evidence and ascribe it to such a reason would be way too unparsimonious to take seriously.
Oh shoot me. I didn't take it particularly serious and I have offered other interpretations.
"Pinscher and Schnauzer" are Molossoid and Swiss Mountain and Cattledogs (FCI). Pinschers do not typically have a beard. Whereas Wire-Haired Dachshound do have a beard, it seems to be simply a feature of the type of fur.
And what do you mean by "no further evidence"? The dictionaries are out there. It is just literally not my job to interpret the evidence. For example, French chiennet is a typical diminutive and French is spoken in Switzerland, where the breed is said to be common. Old Lithuanian snùkis, snukỹs, dim. snukẽlis is literally "Maul, Schnauze"–contradicting my earlier statement–and as derivatives of *ḱwón- there'd be dim. šunýtis, šunỹtis, šunytlis, beside Latvian sunĩtis [ALEW]. That makes Schnauzer the tertium comparandum.
* [Alew] Hock et al.: Altlitauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (ALEW). Version 2.0, s.v. šuõ. Online verfügbar unter: https://alew.hu-berlin.de/dict/2454.
While I see no immediately relevant tangent to schnoz, I took a quick look at *kalb- and find that כלב resembles German Kläffer to an unlikely degree of coincidence as far as the syncope above applies here as well. Wolfgang Pfeifer refers kläffen (to bark, to yap) to klaffen which is imitative following Kluge and related to english clap, to make noise. Halt die Klappe is pretty much synonym to Schnauze, after all.