Gustav Adolf Seiler (philologist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gustav Adolf Seiler (born September 20, 1848 in Binningen , † April 30, 1936 in Basel ; resident in Frenkendorf ) was a Swiss district , secondary and cantonal school teacher and philologist . His dictionary of the dialect of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft , published in 1879, is of lasting importance .

Life

Seiler attended the primary school in Binningen and the grammar school as well as the then pedagogy in Basel. He then studied languages ​​and history at the Universities of Basel (here with Moritz Heyne , among others ), Heidelberg and Geneva, and completed a gymnastics course in Karlsruhe .

Professionally, Seiler was a teacher for German, ancient languages ​​and gymnastics. 1871–1875 he worked at the district school in Liestal , during which time he married Sarah Müller from Liestal. Because “Baselland was pretty much dead spiritually”, he taught at the canton school in Frauenfeld from 1875 to 1877 . His son of the same name, Gustav Adolf Seiler , later a lawyer, national councilor and councilor, was born in Thurgau . In 1877, Seiler was appointed to the girls' secondary school in Basel, where he worked until his retirement in 1919.

Seiler was senior gymnast in the Liestal gymnastics club, 1873-1875 and 1877 Baselbieter canton gymnast and in 1873 he introduced the so-called gymnastics concerts, which were the focus of the club's performances decades later.

Dialectological and naming work

In addition to his work as a teacher, Seiler contributed tirelessly to the work of the Swiss Idiotikons . After its editors had published a "Plan des Schweizerischen Idiotikons" and a booklet with sample articles in 1874, Seiler registered his interest in collaboration that same year. However, he did not stop at sending in a smaller or larger list of words or answering questions, but rather developed his main work, Die Basler Mundart -, printed in 1879, in less than five years, with the help of numerous local dialect connoisseurs and Idiotikon editor Friedrich Staub . a 330-page dictionary of the Basel urban and rural dialect, supplemented by a thirty-page dialect grammar. With his precise knowledge of words and things, the embedding of the words in a context, the inclusion of dialect literature, the consideration of large parts of folk culture in general and an appendix on the grammar of Basel German, Seiler created a work that - together with the two years earlier published Aargauer Dictionary of Jacob Hunziker - then his peers and was looking to date a milestone in the history of German dialectology represents.

In the same year as the dictionary, Seiler published the dialect anthology Gottwilche! out. On the one hand, this should be a supplement to the dictionary, but on the other hand it should also be used in German lessons : Based on my own convictions and inspired by Johannes Meyer's German language book for higher allemannische Volksschulen (Schaffhausen 1866) and Jost Winteler's On the Justification of German Language Lessons in the Dialect of the Pupil ( Bern 1878), Seiler advocated that dialect should be made the starting point for German language teaching.

From 1881 until his death, Seiler finally worked on a comprehensive compilation and - at Dust's insistence - interpretation of the Basel field names and family names. However, it was never published. A few smaller essays on topics related to naming , mainly published in the Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, show that Seiler's interpretations are sometimes somewhat daring and therefore now outdated. All of the materials are now in the State Archives of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft.

Works

  • The Basel dialect. A grammatical-lexical contribution to the Swiss-German Idiotikon, at the same time a dictionary for school and home. Detloff, Basel 1879 ( digitized version ); Unchanged reprint: Sänd Reprint, Wolluf near Wiesbaden 1970.
  • Gottwilche! Alemannic sounds from the city and landscape of Basel. Selected for friends of the dialect. Lüdin & Walser, Liestal 1879.

literature

  • [without the author's name:] G. Adolf Seiler, old secondary school teacher in Basel, on his 80th birthday. In: Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, September 20, 1928, p. 2.
  • L. F .: On the death of Gustav Adolf Seiler- (Müller). In: Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, May 4, 1936.
  • Kaspar Birkhäuser: Gustav Adolf Seiler. In: The personal dictionary of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft. Liestal 1997.
  • Marcel Müller: Seiler, Gustav Adolf. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . (with incorrect assignment of the collection of names to the book Die Basler Mundart; corrected in the online version of the lexicon).
  • Eduard Strübin: The beginnings of Basel dialect research and the Swiss Idioticon. In: Swiss German Dictionary. Report on the year 1992 (PDF file; 2.53 MB), o. O. 1993, pp. 10–21 and, slightly revised, in: Baselbieter Heimatblätter 58 (1993), pp. 134–144.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Seiler January 2, 1875 by letter to Friedrich Staub; see Strübin (1993).
  2. ↑ Basellandschaftliche Zeitung (bz) of October 19, 20, 24 and 25, 1900 (Das Eithal near Tecknau and Giessen); Alemannia NF II 2/3, 1901 (the place names Lys and Lysbüchel); bz from January 10 and 11, 1902 (The name Liestal); bz from [...?] 1929 or special print (Passwang and Hohe Winde) .
personal data
SURNAME Seiler, Gustav Adolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seiler, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss teacher and philologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Binningen
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1936
Place of death Basel