Jakob Hunziker

Jakob Hunziker (1827–1901)

Jakob Hunziker (born September 27, 1827 in Kirchleerau ; † June 5, 1901 in Rombach, municipality of Küttigen ) was a Swiss grammar school teacher and temporarily rector of the Aarau Cantonal School . His life's work was his folklore research on the farmhouses in Switzerland, which were published largely posthumously in eight volumes 1900–1914 under the title Das Schweizerhaus, depicted according to its landscape forms and its historical development . In addition, with his Aargau dictionary in the phonetic form of the Leerau dialect of 1877, he was one of the pioneers of Swiss-German dialect lexicography .

Life

Jakob Hunziker grew up as the son of the senior teacher Heinrich Hunziker and Elisabeth Hunziker-Hunziker in his hometown of Kirchleerau in southwest Aargau . He attended grammar school in Aarau (today's old canton school Aarau ), where he passed the Matura in 1848. He then studied philology in Munich and Bonn . From 1851 to 1859 he taught in Paris , first at a private school and then as a private teacher, German and classical languages, prepared indices on Platon and Plutarch for the Bibliotheca Graeca , worked on the Dictionnaire d'Archéologie , wrote book reviews (including publications by Ernest Renan and Auguste Jal ) and worked as a correspondent for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung . In 1859 he was appointed by the canton of Aargau to its canton school in Aarau, where he - given the title of professor - worked as a French teacher. In 1868 Hunziker married Mathilde Champ-Renaud, the daughter of a landowner from western Switzerland; the marriage had three sons and two daughters.

Despite his work as a French teacher, Hunziker was a passionate advocate of the German language and culture. This inclination is due not only to a publication on the “Kampf um das Deutschtum” in Switzerland, but primarily to the two sideline activities with which Hunziker's name was to remain permanently connected, namely the support of the young Swiss idiot by means of a specially developed dictionary as well as his extensive ethnographic research in the field of farmhouse research . In 1896, Hunziker was a co-founder of the Swiss Society for Folklore and worked for it several times as an arbitrator for award work.

He was also active in history and (early) monument preservation. From 1871–1881 he was Vice President, 1881–1889 and 1892–1901 as President of the Historical Society of the Canton of Aargau and from 1889–1901 as Curator of the Cantonal Antiquarian Book (now the Museum Aargau ). He published on various archaeological excavations in his canton and finally worked in 1898 as head of the inventory of the "antiquities" in the canton of Aargau. His literary and cultural history as well as historical lectures were numerous, also in printed form, about the Rolandslied , Rousseau , Voltaire , the Aargau sagas, the Aargau dialect, " Old Athens " or the Bündner Wirren .

In addition to his teaching activities, Hunziker held numerous offices in the Aargau school administration. From 1868–1874 he worked as the rector of the canton school, during which time he unsuccessfully tried to replace the Swiss collegiate system with the German directorate system at his school , and played a major role in the creation of the canton school's student house. For a total of 16 years he was a member of the Aargau Education Council (a body assigned to the cantonal school ministry), 13 years school inspector, specialist French inspector, member and 1890-1897 president of the examination commission for district teachers , 1873-1897 member of the management of the teachers' college , board member and president of the cantonal teachers' conference, member of the editorial committee of the Aargau School Gazette and member of the jury for the school system at the Paris World Exhibition, elected by the Federal Council in 1889.

Hunziker was evidently strongly influenced by his German and philosophy teacher, the witty but idiosyncratic Ernst Ludwig Rochholz , with whom he was in lively exchange until his death. His choice of studies, the later folklore activity as well as his German national, at least at times expressly Greater German attitude are attributed to the influence of this teacher. Hunziker was also in friendly contact with the Aargau government councilor Augustin Keller and with Federal Councilor Emil Welti , to whom he and other personalities later devoted biographies and obituaries.

Along with Jost Winteler, Hunziker was “the most important personality in the teaching staff” at the Aarau Cantonal School. In 1896 the University of Zurich awarded him the Doctor honoris causa . Hunziker's estate is in the Aargau State Archives .

Create

«Aargau Dictionary»

After a decision had been made in Zurich in 1862 to develop a dictionary of Swiss German - the later Swiss Idioticon - the Cantonal Conference of Aargau teachers decided on October 1, 1866 in Lenzburg to follow Friedrich Staub's call for cooperation and to use an Aargau dictionary as a contribution to the to create all-German-Swiss. The original plan to work out an idioticon for all Aargau dialects was replaced in 1867 by the first to write one in a local dialect, which was then to serve as a model for other small-scale dictionaries (which is why the work ended up being called Aargau dictionary in the sound of the Leerau dialect received; further dictionaries of local Aargau dialect were then of course not available). In 1871, Hunziker was commissioned by the Cantonal Teachers' Conference to develop it, and the latter decided to use his own dialect:

'Not that the local dialect we have presented has a special peculiarity, but the linguistic certainty of any local dialect had to be assumed if an inconsistent fluctuation between different dialect varieties did not impair the reliability of our surveys from the start. If this was established, the dialect of my hometown seemed the most suitable to achieve the greatest possible security and completeness within voluntary restriction to the same. "

- Jakob Hunziker : Aargauer dictionary in the phonetic form of Leerau, 1877, p. VIII

In the preface to this ( apart from Titus Tobler's Appenzellian vocabulary from 1837), the first modern dialect dictionary in Switzerland, Hunziker presents in detail the basic ideas of dialectological work that are still in place today. The first part of the work consists of around 120 pages of phonology in the Leerau dialect, in the formulation of which Hunziker was supported by Jost Winteler , a teacher in Aarau and a pioneer of dialectal phonetics . The 331-page dictionary that follows is not limited to the lexicons , but also includes example sentences and idioms, supplements them with detailed grammatical discussions, gives so-called functional words such as the article or prepositions a lot of space and also includes interjections and even children's sounds not from; Hunziker received support here from the founder of the Swiss Idiotikon, Friedrich Staub. His Aargauer Dictionary from 1877 forms as two years later published the Basel dialect of Gustav Adolf Seiler a milestone in Swiss German dialect lexicography .

Hunziker's dictionary was digitized in 2019 by a team led by Matthias Friedli from the Swiss Idiotikon and Dieter Studer-Joho from the phonogram archive of the University of Zurich and put online at the end of the same year. The website also offers a great deal of additional information on the Aargau dialects.

"The Swiss House"

No sooner had Hunziker finished his dictionary than he turned to the Swiss farmhouse research founded by his contemporary Ernst Georg Gladbach . By 1900 the manuscripts for seven volumes were available in which he documented the rural house types in all regions of Switzerland. Volume 1 was for Valais, Volume 2 for Ticino, Volume 3 for Graubünden, Glarus and southern St. Gallen, Volume 4 for Western Switzerland, Volume 5 (“The three-part house”) for the German-speaking Central Plateau between Saane and Thur and the Alemannic Jura, Volume 6 ("The three-part house, 2nd department: The Swabian House") of northeastern Switzerland and Volume 7 ("The Lander House") of the northeastern Swiss Alps and foothills, Central Switzerland, the Bernese Oberland and the Vaudois Pays d'Enhaut. Before his death, Hunziker could only publish the first volume. Jost Winteler was responsible for the publication of the second volume, and all others were overseen by Constanz Jecklin. The latter also took on the task of writing the synoptic "closing words" announced by Hunziker, which had to be reconstructed from preliminary work and lectures, creating the register and drawing the map of the house types that together make up the eighth volume. The “general overview”, which “was supposed to combine the results of the previous study with regard to ethnological and ethnographic questions”, remained unwritten, however. With Hunziker's work, Switzerland has a “unique […] collection of material that no other country has for a time from which so many of the houses depicted have already disappeared”.

Compared with previous publications on the Swiss farmhouse, what was new was the fact that even apparently insignificant buildings were taken into account and the volumes were richly furnished with plans and photographs. Another special feature was that Hunziker not only had the “technically accurate recording” of the building in mind, but also focused on the language, for which he again worked with the editorial team of Schweizerischer Idiotikons :

“Another aid that the technician as such completely escapes is the nomenclature. Language is a highly conservative element. It still preserves the memory of designs that have disappeared from reality for centuries. It alone controls the functional value of the individual component in the last instance. Whether I call the room in question "ērm" or "corridor" does not change anything in its current form and function and can therefore be completely indifferent to the technician as such, but the mere naming of the ērm proves irrefutably that the function of the so named room was once completely different from what the modern name suggests. "

- Jakob Hunziker : The Swiss house according to its landscape forms and its historical development, first section, 1900, p. VIII

Hunziker was a proponent of the ethnic theory, according to which "the scattered village complex is of Germanic origin and the closed patches of Romanesque origin, that the German style prefers the wooden structure, the Romanesque to the stone structure, that the Romanesque house is derived from the old Roman, while the German on the example of the old Germanic homestead goes back ». This view is outdated today: scattered settlements can be found in later settled, clustered villages, as a rule in areas that have been developed earlier, the choice of wood and stone construction is based on the natural conditions and not on ethnic grounds, and today's house forms did not arise in ancient times , but go back to the late Middle Ages and early modern times. Hunziker's documentation of the farmhouse types was replaced by the series Die Bauernhäuser der Schweiz published by the Swiss Society for Folklore from 1965 to 2019 .

Publications (selection)

A compilation of Hunziker's numerous publications made by Jost Winteler can be found in Argovia 1901, pp. III – XI, which in the same memoirs of Dr. Jakob Hunziker, Aarau 1902, p. 29 f. is supplemented.

• Aargau dictionary in the phonetic form of the Leerauer dialect. Sauerländer, Aarau 1877 ( digitized version ). Reprints Sendet, Wiesbaden 1968 and Sendet, Vaduz 1989. Interactive digitalization on hunziker2020.ch .
• Augustin Keller. A picture of life dedicated to the Aargau people. Sauerlander, Aarau 1883.
• Ernst Ludwig Rochholz. Sauerländer, Aarau 1893 (supplement to the program of the Aargau Cantonal School for the school year 1892/93) .
• The farmhouse in the Grand Duchy of Baden compared to that in Switzerland. In: Swiss Archives for Folklore 2 (1898), pp. 89–105, 193–214.
• Switzerland. Lehmann, Munich 1898 ( The Struggle for Germanism, Issue 10).
• The Schweizerhaus, depicted according to its landscape forms and its historical development. Volumes I – VIII. Sauerländer, Aarau 1900–1914.
• Emil Welti in Aargau. In: Argovia 28 (1900), pp. 1-79 ( digitized version ).

literature

• Hans Kaeslin: Jakob Hunziker 1827–1901. In: Biographisches Lexikon des Aargau 1803–1957. Edited by the Historical Society of the Canton of Aargau. Sauerländer, Aarau 1958 (also Argovia 68/69), pp. 380–386 ( digitized version ).
• Karin Marti-Weissenbach: Hunziker, Jakob. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Th. V .: † Prof. Dr. Jakob Hunziker. Born September 27, 1827, died June 5, 1901. In: Swiss Archives for Folklore 5 (1901), pp. 152–154 ( digitized version ).
• Markus Widmer-Dean: village chronicle 750 years Kirchleerau (1248–1998). Zofinger Tagblatt, Zofingen 1998, pp. 98-102.
• Jost Winteler : Professor Dr. Jakob Hunziker. †. In: Anniversary program of the Aargau Cantonal School (in Aarau), 100th school year. 1901/1902. [Aarau] 1902, pp. 61–91 (where particularly during Hunziker's time in Paris and German national thinking). Also as a separate print under the title: Memories of Dr. Jakob Hunziker, professor at the aarg. Cantonal school 1859–1901. Sauerländer, Aarau 1902 ( digitized ).
• Jost Winteler: † Professor Dr. J. Hunziker, President of the Aargau Historical Society. In: Argovia 29 (1901), pp. III – IX (where in particular on Hunziker's cultural-historical and historical-scientific activities; digitized version ).

Further:

• J [akob] Hunziker: Preface. In: Jakob Hunziker: Aargauer dictionary in the phonetic form of the Leerauer dialect. Sauerländer, Aarau 1877, pp. V – XII.
• J [akob] Hunziker: Preface. In: Jakob Hunziker: The Swiss house according to its landscape forms and historical development. First section [= 1st volume]. Sauerländer, Aarau 1900, pp. V – IX.
• C [onstanz] Jecklin: Foreword. In: Jakob Hunziker: The Swiss house according to its landscape forms and historical development. 8th volume. Sauerländer, Aarau 1914, pp. III – IX.
• Richard Weiss : Houses and Landscapes in Switzerland. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zürich / Stuttgart 1959. Reissued and provided with a foreword by Jean-Pierre Anderegg in Haupt, Bern 2017, ISBN 978-3-258-08017-8 , pp. 19–24.

Web links

• Publications by and about Jakob Hunziker in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
• hunziker2020.ch

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The statement in the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland that Hunziker also studied in Paris cannot be found in any other source.
2. ^ Hans Kaeslin: Jakob Hunziker 1827–1901. In: Biographisches Lexikon des Aargau 1803–1957. Edited by the Historical Society of the Canton of Aargau. Sauerländer, Aarau 1958 (also Argovia 68/69), pp. 380–386, here p. 381 f.
3. ^ Hans Kaeslin: Jakob Hunziker 1827–1901. In: Biographisches Lexikon des Aargau 1803–1957. Edited by the Historical Society of the Canton of Aargau. Sauerländer, Aarau 1958 (also Argovia 68/69), pp. 380–386, here p. 386.
4. ↑ See list of personal papers in the Aargau State Archives .
5. ↑ hunziker2000.ch (accessed on January 1, 2020). See also Hansruedi Kugler: Karfange - oh mano: two linguists are in love with almost forgotten Aargau everyday treasures, aargauerzeitung.ch from January 31, 2019 / January 1, 2020 (accessed on January 1, 2020).
6. ^ Richard Weiss: Houses and Landscapes of Switzerland. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich / Stuttgart 1959, p. 19.
7. ↑ For example, mentioned "Erm" see Swiss Idiotikon, Volume I, column 461 f., Articles Ern I .
8. ^ ^{A b} Richard Weiss: Houses and Landscapes of Switzerland. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich / Stuttgart 1959, p. 20.
9. ↑ The Swiss farmhouses on volkskunde.ch and the “Swiss farmhouses” series on zg.ch (both accessed on January 1, 2020).