South Hessian dictionary
The South Hessian Dictionary is a large-scale dictionary that documents the Rhine-Franconian dialects of South Hesse and Rhine Hesse. It was developed at the University of Giessen .
type
The South Hessian Dictionary is a scientific large-scale dictionary of the dialectal and regional lexicons of the South Hessian language area with alphabetical order of the keywords and a lemma approach based on the written language. It is aimed primarily at linguists, especially dialectologists, folklorists, historians and representatives of other disciplines as well as interested laypeople.
Spatially, the work area includes around 650 locations in the two southern provinces of the former Grand Duchy of Hesse , Starkenburg and Rheinhessen, as well as some former Hesse-Darmstadt exclaves. The dictionary material is predominantly synchronized, it represents the dialect vocabulary from the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. Individual, selected historical documents (from documents, wisdoms, chronicles, etc.) complete the material base.
The South Hessian dictionary offers the entire vocabulary of the basic dialects and the urban colloquial languages of the work area. Within the basic dialects, the technical vocabulary of the most important branches of industry in the study area, for example viticulture, masonry, wood and stone carving and the oak peeling industry, play an important role. Material from the tradition of names (person, place and field names) is only taken into account sporadically.
Neighboring dictionaries of the same type are the Hessen-Nassau dictionary towards the north, the Rhenish dictionary towards the west, the Palatinate dictionary towards the south-west, the Baden dictionary towards the south and the Franconian dictionary towards the east .
history
In 1925 the Historical Commission for Hesse suggested creating an "Odenwald dictionary". It was intended to close the existing gap in southern Germany within the German dictionary landscape and to cover the two southern provinces of the former Grand Duchy of Hesse, Starkenburg and Rheinhessen.
Friedrich Maurer took over the preparatory work for the collection of dialect vocabulary . He began to promote the new company in calls and lectures; he found volunteers, especially among the teaching staff in the former Hesse-Darmstadt provinces. From 1927 to 1934, the Gießen law firm sent out a monthly questionnaire, with verbal and factual questions alternating. The around 100 questionnaires also included special areas such as viticulture, forestry and forestry, tobacco growing, bricklaying, wagons and plows.
Under Maurer's successors Friedrich Stroh (1931–1937) and Alfred Götze (1937–1945) the Great Depression and World War II paralyzed the evaluation of the extensive material obtained.
A third era in the history of the South Hessian Dictionary began in 1948 when Rudolf Mulch took over the collection . In addition to his work in the school service, he devoted himself to the organization of the material and a supplementary material survey in the years 1956 to 1964. In 1965 he began with the publication of the letter A. In 1972 Rudolf Mulch retired, in 1973 his son Roland Mulch took over the management of the processing.
The last delivery with the attachments appeared in 2010, the job was terminated on September 30, 2010. The collected material with the slip archive was handed over to the Hessian State Archive in Darmstadt.
The one-volume Little South Hessian Dictionary , also published by Roland Munch in 2004, is intended to show the “interested layman” the “most distinctive peculiarities in the vocabulary of the South Hessian dialects” and to illustrate “the pictorial expression and humorous originality of the everyday spoken dialect”.
Sources and material base
Note archive with approx. 1.5 million word references, index. Library with approx. 4000 volumes.
The material collection includes
- the scientific literature on the dialects concerned
- the available handwritten materials (going back to 1865)
- free word collections from over 500 employees
- the results of the first and second questionnaire action (almost 120 indirect questionnaires)
- dialect poetry that dates back to the first half of the 19th century
The written holdings were enriched by tape recordings and checked with direct recordings in the dictionary room. Those responsible for the questionnaire surveys mostly belong to the local agricultural or craft population that has been resident for generations. The materials obtained from an onomasiological point of view were bogged down in lay transcription, lemmatized in high-language or "Verneu High German" form and arranged strictly alphabetically in a card catalog. Reference keywords help you to find words that are only used in dialect.
Even during the publication phase, the Gießen dictionary office had its own contact with permanent volunteer information providers (around 270 people) in the area being processed. Two surveys were sent out annually. These relate to words and idioms that were unclear during editing. The good contact with the local dialect speakers meant that 95 percent of all semantic problem cases could be solved in the last 30 years.
Publication status
- Start of publication: 1965
- Volume 1 (A - D) 1968
- Volume 2 (E - G) 1972
- Volume 3 (H - Ksch) 1977
- Volume 4 (Ku - R) 1985
- Volume 5 (S) 1998
- Volume 6 (T - Z, appendices) 2010
The dictionary has been accessible online since 2014.
literature
- Foreword and work report of the South Hessian Dictionary, I (1965ff.), P. V ff.
- R. Mulch: South Hessian Dictionary. ZMF 32 (1965), pp. 143-145.
- R. Mulch: The South Hessian Dictionary. In: Dialect Lexicography. Reports on the status and methods of German dialect dictionaries. Ceremony for Luise Berthold on her 85th birthday. Ed. V. H. Friebertshäuser, ZDL. Supplements N. F. 17, Wiesbaden 1976, pp. 79-90.
- R. Mulch: The beginnings of the South Hessian dictionary in the twenties. In: Symposium Ernst Christmann. Ed. V. W. Kleiber (Mainz Studies on Language and Folk Research 11), Stuttgart 1987, pp. 55–59.
- R. Mulch: Problems of synonymy in a large-scale dialect dictionary. In: Capturing and describing meaning in historical and dialectological dictionaries. Contributions to a working conference of German-language dictionaries, projects at academies and universities from March 7th to 9th, 1996 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. Edited by R. Grosse. Stuttgart – Leipzig 1998 (Treatises of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. Phil.-Hist. Class, 75, Issue 1), pp. 157–165.