Franconian dictionary
The Franconian Dictionary (WBF, former project name: East Franconian Dictionary ) is like the Bavarian Dictionary a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . As a large-scale dictionary, it documents the dialects spoken in Franconia .
Project
The project, founded in 1913, aims to document the dialects spoken in the three Franconian administrative districts of Bavaria - Upper , Middle and Lower Franconia . These belong primarily to the East Franconian , but also to the Rhine Franconian , Swabian and North Bavarian language areas in the peripheral areas of the Franconian region . Conversely, those East Franconian dialects that are spoken outside of Bavarian Franconia are recorded by the neighboring large-scale dictionaries.
The project has been based at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2012 and is headed by Mechthild Habermann, who holds the chair for German linguistics. The editorial office is based in Fürth ; former locations were Munich (1913–1933), Erlangen (1933–1993) and Bayreuth (1993–2012).
The original idea of developing a multi-volume book publication analogous to the other large-scale German dictionaries was dropped in 2003 in favor of a digital dictionary. This online dictionary is already available and is constantly being expanded. In order to prevent “the looming acceptance crisis of the 'big, long-term' projects”, the one-volume short dictionary of Bavarian Franconia , which was compiled by Eberhard Wagner and Alfred Klepsch, was published in 2007, which presents a selection of words and language cards.
Material base
Over the course of 90 years (1913–2001), thousands of volunteer workers took part and collected extensive material from the Bavarian districts of Upper , Middle and Lower Franconia . This collection forms the basis of the dictionary archive, which contains mostly East Franconian , but also Rhenish Franconian , Swabian and North Bavarian documents. The collection is based on around 20,000 handwritten questionnaires, the analysis of which resulted in more than a million index cards. In addition, there are spontaneously collected documents such as handwritten or typed dialect texts as well as excerpted material from the printed dialect literature and (handwritten or printed) local dictionaries.
In order to secure the valuable original material, most of the data was scanned in 2012 and saved in the form of image files. The Franconian district governments financed this digitization.
history
prehistory
From 1899 the publisher Rudolf Oldenbourg had plans to reissue Johann Andreas Schmeller's Bavarian Dictionary (1st edition 1827/1832, 2nd edition 1872/1877). This had documented all dialects that were spoken in the territory of the then Kingdom of Bavaria, i.e. Bavarian (which was the focus), Swabian , East Franconian and Rhenish Palatinate . In 1911, however, the academies in Munich and Vienna decided not to address this issue and instead created three completely new dictionaries:
- a Bavarian dictionary for old Bavaria and Austria (later split into the Bavarian dictionary and the dictionary of Bavarian dialects in Austria ; both are still in work today),
- an East Franconian dictionary (now called Franconian dictionary ; still in progress today) and
- a Palatinate dictionary (work completed in 1997).
Project (East) Franconian Dictionary
| 1911 | The Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Imperial Austrian Academy of Sciences decide to jointly create a dictionary of the Bavarian dialect. The Bavarian Academy also decides to develop a dictionary of the East Franconian and a dictionary of the Palatinate dialects. |
| 1913 | Work begins with sending out questionnaires. |
| 1915 | The First World War interrupted the survey work. |
| 1927 | New attempt: Sending the "dialect geographic questionnaires". |
| 1932 | The Erlangen professor of German studies Friedrich Maurer begins his own research on the Franconian dialect. Dispatch of the "Mason Arch". |
| 1933 | The Academy is setting up its own editorial team for an "East Franconian Dictionary" in Erlangen . Friedrich Maurer is the director. Development of the "central file", dissemination and lemmatization of the receipts since 1913 (continued until 2001). |
| 1941 | The Second World War interrupted the survey work. |
| 1960 | New beginning: The Erlangen philologist Siegfried Beyschlag has the surveys revived. New questionnaires, the “post-war questionnaires”, are sent out every four months and answered by hundreds of volunteers. Since then, numerous small scientific papers on parts of the vocabulary have been written and some have been published. |
| 1963 | The Bavarian Academy of Sciences equips the Erlangen editorial team with a post for an editor. Erich Straßner becomes editor. |
| 1963-2001 | Survey work using questionnaires and oral surveys (1967). |
| 1967 | Eberhard Wagner becomes editor. |
| 1993 | The editorial team moves to Bayreuth . |
| 2001 | End of the questionnaire sending. |
| 2003 | Decision of the Commission for Dialect Research of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences to forego the book publication of the Franconian dictionary in favor of a digital dictionary. Alfred Klepsch becomes editor. |
| 2007 | A selection of around 1500 words, together with 32 word cards, is published as a 640-page concise dictionary by Bayerisch-Franken (HWBF). |
| 2012 | Cooperation agreement between the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the FAU Erlangen. Mechthild Habermann, a German scholar from Erlangen, becomes the project manager. The editorial office moves to Fürth , as the Jean Paul Society, based at the previous location, claims the rooms in the Chamberlain House.
Renaming of the project from "East Franconian Dictionary" to "Franconian Dictionary". |
| 2013 | The questionnaires and index cards are scanned with funds from the Franconian district governments. |
| 2015 | Alfred Klepsch and Almut König work 50% each as editors. |
WBF digital
With the decision to develop an online dictionary, the Franconian dictionary is breaking new ground in dialect lexicography. The dialect documents are recorded in a full-text database and determined both grammatically and semantically.
This creates an online dictionary that replaces the tedious and lengthy research in the editorial office's archive and makes the evidence available to a scientific and non-scientific public. This online dictionary is already publicly accessible while the database is still under construction. As the input and preparation work progresses, it is supplemented and expanded step by step.
The work on the database allows the first evaluations under overarching aspects, even if by no means finished. The data has already served students as a basis for master's theses and the Erlangen specialist colleagues as a basis for scientific evaluations.
Literature and web links
- Eberhard Wagner and Alfred Klepsch: Concise dictionary of Bavarian Franconia. Fränkischer Tag GmbH, Bamberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-936897-52-4 ; 3rd, unchanged edition, ibid. 2008.
- "Franconian Dictionary" project
- Almut König: Franconian Dictionary - Blog of the Franconian Dictionary
- Bavarian Academy of Sciences
- Chair of German Linguistics FAU
- East Franconian Dictionary at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ( Memento from April 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- Information on the printed work "Handwortbuch von Bayerisch-Franken" ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ WBF digital.
- ^ Eberhard Wagner and Alfred Klepsch: Concise dictionary of Bavarian Franconia. Fränkischer Tag GmbH, Bamberg 2007, p. 607.
- ^ Concise dictionary of Bavarian Franconia. Fränkischer Tag GmbH, Bamberg 2007, 3rd, unchanged edition, ibid. 2008.
- ^ East Franconian dictionary, about us, evaluations ( Memento from December 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved June 18, 2017.
- ↑ Bavarian Dictionary, Volume I, pp. VII – IX; Concise dictionary of Bavarian Franconia, Bamberg 2007, p. 9.