Heinrich Bruppacher (philologist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heinrich Bruppacher
in his younger years
Heinrich Bruppacher
in later years

Heinrich Bruppacher (born March 30, 1845 in Zollikon ; † May 29, 1906 ibid.) Was a classical philologist , Germanist and folklorist who worked for around four decades in various functions for the Swiss Idiotikon . He was also important for his home village Zollikon, about which he wrote a comprehensive cultural-historical local history together with Alexander Nüesch .

Life

The «Obristenhof» 1914

Bruppacher was born as the eldest child of the Zolliker farmer Heinrich Bruppacher and his wife Anna, née Ernst. He attended primary school in Zollikon, secondary school in Neumünster (today in Zurich) and high school in the city of Zurich . After graduating from high school in 1864, he studied classical philology and German at the University of Zurich . In 1869 Bruppacher received his doctorate with a work on Oskish , an Italian language spoken in pre-Christian times in the southern half of Italy .

When Friedrich Staub , the founder of the Swiss Idiotikon, published his call for a Swiss-German dictionary in 1862, the high school student Bruppacher immediately decided to take part. In 1868 the dictionary's annual report stated that his contributions “testify to a fine gift of observation, especially in the field of phonetics. Although he draws from the neighborhood of the city, he brings some rarities under shelter that we had no idea of ​​their existence. " In fact, almost all documents in the printed work go with the "ZZoll." (for "Canton Zurich, Zollikon") are located back to Bruppacher, as it is called in Hermann Blattner's obituary.

After university, Bruppacher was offered a position as a private tutor several times, but he always sent friends because he didn't want to "do the toilet", as he put it, that is, he didn't want to change his rural character for urban behavior. In 1874/1875 he worked at a boys' institute in Kornthal near Stuttgart , but homesickness prompted him to return to Zurich, whereupon Staub placed him at the Swiss Idiotikon for a year .

For a long time, Bruppacher then worked as a private scholar and also gave high school students tutoring in ancient languages. At the same time he wrote out older Swiss literature to the hand of the material corpus of the Swiss Idiotikon . In 1879 he was a member of the dictionary's editorial committee for a short time. In 1887/1888 he worked as an assistant teacher at the Zurich Cantonal School and from 1888 to 1894 as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the newly founded Free Gymnasium . At the same time he had a considerable number of private students (there were 117 in 1887 alone), and from 1886 to 1890 he was also employed as an editor at the Swiss Idioticon . In addition, he continued to pursue historical and linguistic studies. He finally moved to the Idiotikon in 1894, where he was the fourth editor after Friedrich Staub, Ludwig Tobler and Rudolf Schoch, who was named on the title page of the work.

In 1888 in his mid-forties, he married Maria Maurer, who was 23 years his junior, and together they raised seven children. The family lived in the Zolliker Oberdorf in the "Obristenhof" built in 1528, which Bruppacher had acquired four years after his marriage. Two sons became pastors; Heinrich jun. (1890–1959) worked in Matt and Langnau am Albis , Hans (1891–1978) in Mühlehorn , in Buchs and in Winterthur (according to the Idiotikon's archive in Wülflingen , according to the registry of the University of Zurich in Töss ); Hans also became a councilor of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich .

Bruppacher died after a short but serious illness of heart paralysis caused by diabetes at the age of 61. His successor at the Swiss Idioticon was Johann Ulrich Hubschmied .

Create

"Swiss Idioticon"

The obituaries say that Bruppacher did a lot for the Swiss Idiotikon . He himself brought his traditional Zurich German (in the variant of the Seemundart) and his broad knowledge to the dictionary work. In addition to writing articles of speech, for the purpose of increasing the dictionary sources, he constantly pulled out manuscripts as well as linguistic, historical, cultural-historical and religious literature from different centuries, which he could access in the city ​​library and in the state archive. In 1876/1877 he received 2 cents for each written out voucher that had already been crossed out by Friedrich Staub, and 3 cents for those that he had excerpted himself. As the author of dictionary articles, he benefited from his great philological instinct; He was particularly interested in the areas of material culture , customs , folklore , rural daily work, handicrafts and rural thinking, talking and doing. A typical Idiotikon article by Bruppacher is the one about bread - an article in which the folkloric and cultural-historical significance of bread is exhaustively dealt with. As a folk-oriented person, he was also aware that the Swiss Idioticon is too complex to be really popular, which is why he wrote in the Zürcher Wochen-Chronik in 1906 :

“Of course, it is not a popular book [the Swiss Idioticon ], if only because of its size. Soon after its completion, however, the time will come when an extract in one or two volumes will be made from the many volumes of the same. If this is carried out by an expert hand, then the people will also have a compact and clear mirror of their entire linguistic and cultural life. "

The editors of the Schweizerischer Idiotikons stuck to this vision until today.

"The old Zollikon"

Cover of the book "Das alten Zollikon" (1899)
«The old Zollikon», magnificent edition (1899)

Cultural history also played a central role in the chronicle of the old Zollikon, which Bruppacher and Zolliker Pastor Alexander Nüesch wrote and published in 1899. Bruppacher himself regarded the Zolliker Chronik as his actual life's work; there he was able to operate much more freely than in his articles in the Schweizerischer Idiotikon, where he only accepted the strict methodology with great resistance. In the review, which the Neue Zürcher Zeitung printed on March 28, 1899, the book was almost universally praised: the work was original, it was not based on the usual scheme of the local chronicles that appeared in large numbers at the time, and thus circumvented the mistakes that were made for publications are typical of this type. The cultural-historical orientation of the book is particularly appreciated and the fact that it functions as a kind of document book for Zollikon, which means that it does not only appeal to local historians; Moreover, it also provides information on economic history. The chapters that Bruppacher had written - about the forest, the place and field names, the personal names and genders, the house brands, agriculture and trade, the wells, etc. - betrayed a “fine feeling and deep understanding of the people's mind and kind in the past ». Despite its strong scientific nature, the book is "nothing less than unpopular". Most recently, the reviewer said:

«We must confess that we have not just read a work of this kind which offers such varied information about the life and character of the people, about the customs of that past, in short, as many contributions to our folklore as this one. We congratulate the authors on their gratifying achievement and the community on this beautiful property of which they can be proud. "

Further work

Bruppacher also worked on the scientific edition of Huldrych Zwingli's writings , which was only completed in 2013 . He proofread and wrote the explanations of words in the first two volumes.

He sent the Archive for Swiss Folklore a series of notes on customs in Zollikon, which were printed in the first two volumes. He wrote a large number of artist biographies for the Swiss Artist Lexicon , which came out from 1905. In the Zurich paperback he edited, among other things, an abbreviated version of Josua Maler's autobiography, and in the Zwingliana magazine he published a linguistic interpretation of the family name "Zwingli" that is still valid today.

human

Bruppacher was, as the obituaries say, a multi-talented scholar of at the same time a modest character. Thanks to his extensive excerpting activities for the Swiss Idioticon , among other things, the edification literature from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the chronicles of Aegidius Tschudi , Johannes Stumpf , Valerius Anshelm , Gerold Edlibach , Heinrich Bullinger and Johann Jakob Wick , the file collections were his about the Zurich Reformation and the Old Confederation as well as the natural history works of Conrad Gessner . At last he began to delve into the writings of Jacob Burckhardt .

Bruppacher was a deeply religious person who went to church every Sunday. Morning after morning he walked the five-kilometer commute from Zollikon to Zurich - he arrived at the office no later than half past six in summer, at half past six in winter - and at noon he walked home again to devote himself to writing out sources and his other studies. He preferred the old to the new, and he found it difficult to deal with the fact that a new era also made new demands on the state, the church and the community. All in all, a gruff and suspicious demeanor as well as "hypochondriacal impulses" combined with learning, diligence, loyalty and "Christian hope" to form a "strong, original personality".

Publications (selection)

  • numerous articles in the Schweizerischer Idiotikon, volumes III – VI.
  • Attempt to study the sound of the Oscar language. Dissertation University of Zurich, 1869.
  • Editions and articles in the Zürcher Taschenbuch (ZTB), namely: Josua Maler , autobiography of a Zurich pastor from the second half of the 16th century (ZTB 1885 and 1886), Swiss trip by a young farmer from Lake Zurich in 1805 (ZTB 1904), Zurich marriage contracts from 1441 to 1830 (ZTB 1906).
  • Folklore information in the Archives for Swiss Folklore (AfV), namely cutting bread (AfV I 77), The pocket knife in superstition (AfV I 165), pasture in Zollikon (Canton Zurich) until 1828 (AfV II 63), food conditions (AfV II 63 ), Church customs (AfV II 64).
  • The decline in the Zurich dialect over the past 50 years. Lecture given in the Society for German Language. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, No. 171–173, 1895 ( digitized version ).
  • (with Alexander Nüesch :) The old Zollikon. Cultural-historical picture of a rural community in Zurich from the oldest times to the modern age. Commemoration for the 400th anniversary of the church. Zurich 1899.
  • About personal and family names, with reference to the Middle High German name book by Ad. Socin , Basel 1903. Lecture by Dr. H. Bruppacher, held in the Society for the German Language, September 25, 1903. Book printing of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 1903.
  • The family name Zwingli. In: Zwingliana 2 (1905), pp. 33-36 ( digitized version ).
  • On the history of the Swiss idiot. In: Feuilleton of the Zürcher Wochen-Chronik 17 (1906), pp. Iii – iv, vii – ix, xii – xiii, and 19 (1906), pp. Ii – vi.
  • Article in the Swiss Artist Lexicon about Johannes Bleuler , Johann Heinrich Bleuler , Heinrich Bruppacher (medalist and copper engraver), Heinrich Bruppacher (draftsman and painter), Jakob Bruppacher , the two Johann Caspar Bruppacher (father and son), Hans Ulrich Bruppacher , Thomas Frizzoni , Wilhelm Georgy and David Herter .

literature

  • [Alexander] N [üesch]: [Obituary for Heinrich Bruppacher]. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 28, 1906, p.
  • A [lexander] N [üesch]: † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Zürcher Wochen-Chronik, June 9, 1906, No. 23, p. 178 f.
  • Ludwig P [estalozzi]: [Obituary for Heinrich Bruppacher.] In: Evangelisches Wochenblatt No. 22, 1906.
  • [ Hermann Blattner :] † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Sunday paper of the Basler Nachrichten , July 1, 1906, p. 101 f.
  • R. H .: May 26th. Heinrich Bruppacher in Zollikon. In: Anzeiger für Schweizerische Geschichte, Volume X, Teilband 1907, p. 217 ( digitized version ).
  • F [ritz] D [iethelm]: Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Schweiz , Vol. II, p. 380.
  • Accountability report of the Swiss Idiotikon to the employees, made by the Central Commission in autumn 1868, p. 60 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Report to the h. federal Department of the Interior and to the h. Governments of the subsidizing cantons on the progress of work on the Swiss Idiotikon during 1906, p. 2 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Footnotes

  1. Where no other source is given, the information in this article comes from the obituaries listed below and from the 1906 annual report of the Swiss Idiotikon .
  2. ^ Annual report of the Swiss Idiotikon to the employees, made by the Central Commission in autumn 1868, p. 60 f. ( Digitized version ).
  3. a b c [Hermann Blattner:] † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Sunday newspaper of Basler Nachrichten, July 1, 1906, p. 101 f., Here p. 102.
  4. a b [Hermann Blattner:] † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Sunday newspaper of Basler Nachrichten, July 1, 1906, p. 101 f., Here p. 101.
  5. ^ Bruppacher Heinrich , Bruppacher, Heinrich (jun.) , Hans Bruppacher - Matriculation Edition of the University of Zurich.
  6. According to a letter from Bruppacher to Staub of the 26th "Christm." 1876 ​​(Archive of the Swiss Idiotikon).
  7. Article Brōt in the Swiss Idiotikon, Volume V, Column 923-993.
  8. Cf. on this the work written by Friedrich Staub forty years earlier, Das Bread in the Mirror of Swiss-German vernacular and custom. Read Swiss pastry names. From the papers of the Swiss Idiotikon. Leipzig 1868 ( digitized ).
  9. H [einrich] Br [uppacher]: On the history of the Swiss idiot. In: Feuilleton of the Zürcher Wochen-Chronik 17 (1906), pp. Iii – iv, vii – ix, xii – xiii, and 19 (1906), pp. Ii – vi; here No. 19, p. vi.
  10. Christoph Landolt : A short edition of the Swiss German dictionary? Summary of a feasibility study. In: Swiss German Dictionary. Report on the year 2003. Zurich 2004, pp. 23–37 ( digitized version ). The report reports on a feasibility study carried out in the same year.
  11. C. D .: [Review of] The old Zollikon. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Morgenblatt of March 28, 1899, p. 1 f.
  12. a b c A [lexander] N [üesch]: † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Zürcher Wochen-Chronik, June 9, 1906, No. 23, p. 178 f., Here p. 179.
  13. [Hermann Blattner:] † Dr. Heinrich Bruppacher. In: Sunday paper of the Basler Nachrichten, July 1, 1906, p. 101 f.
  14. According to the Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Schweiz , Volume II, p. 380, the two artists of the same name are likely to be the same person.