Valentin Buhler

The three brothers Valentin (1835–1912), Christian (1837–1904) and Peter Theophil (1841–1913) Bühler.

Valentin Bühler (born March 26, 1835 in Igis , today in Landquart ; † April 30, 1912 in Chur ; citizen of Davos ) was a Swiss lawyer who wrote the book Davos in his Walser dialect from 1870/75/79 and the supplement about wrote the Obersaxer dialect from 1886, one of the first German-speaking Swiss dialect dictionaries .

Life

Valentin Bühler was one of three sons of Pastor Christian Bühler and his wife Barbara, born Roffler from Fideris. The father provided parish posts in Davos-Dorf, Igis, Haldenstein and again in Davos-Dorf, which is why the eldest son, Valentin, was born in Igis and went to primary school in Davos.

Valentin studied in Basel , Göttingen , Leipzig , Berlin and Heidelberg jurisprudence , but also visited germanistische lectures, as in Basel at Wilhelm Wackernagel . From 1862 he worked as a lawyer in Chur and later became an actuary of the Bündner Erziehungsrat (a cantonal authority responsible for schools). At times he also worked as deputy head of the Neue Bündner Zeitung . In 1868 he moved to Heidelberg, the hometown of his wife Elisa Henriette Förster, and worked there as a lawyer and hotelier. The two sons Hans (* 1870; later a lawyer) and Paul (* 1877; later a cantonal school teacher for languages) were born to the couple in Heidelberg. In later years, the family returned to Switzerland, where Bühler held a position as second interrogator ( examining magistrate ) in Chur .

dictionary

Valentin Bühler (1835–1912), handwritten addendum to his Davos dictionary (archive of the Swiss idiot, Zurich).

In 1862, Bühler decided to write a dictionary of his native dialect, the Walser dialect of Davos. According to his own statement, he followed the suggestion of the Vorarlberg historian and Walser researcher Josef Bergmann , who in 1844 had called such a dictionary a desideratum. He was soon aware of the special value of such work, as the dictionary of the Swiss-German language (the Swiss Idioticon ) was founded in Zurich that same year , and so in the foreword of the first part of his dictionary published in 1870 he expressed the conviction that he would participate his work is "the great building of a Swiss idiot in this first printed special work on a Graubünden dialect an easily usable, and hopefully usable, contribution in not only very raw material."

He wrote most of the dictionary in Heidelberg, but used his regular visits to Switzerland when he was serving as a captain in the army to increase his material base. The four-part work was self-published in 1869–1870, 1875, 1879 and 1886. It is one of the earliest Swiss German dictionaries . Before that, only Franz Joseph Stalder's dictionary of all Swiss German (1806/1812) and Titus Tobler's dictionary of Appenzell (1837) had come out in print; Jakob Hunziker wrote his Südwestaargauisches (1877) and Gustav Adolf Seiler his Basel dictionary (1879) around the same time and explicitly as a source for the Swiss Idioticon , and Martin Tschumpert's unfinished attempt at a Graubünden Idiotikon (1880 ff.) also belongs to this first phase of dialect dictionaries .

The first volume of Bühler's dictionary is a special alphabetical dictionary ("lexicographical part"), in the second volume numerous word fields are dealt with, for example about animals, weather, topography, agriculture, law, nursery, etc. ("homonymous part"). The third volume contains words with multiple meanings as well as information on word formation and inflection , the latter in comparison with other Graubünden dialects (“homonymous and grammatical part”). Finally, the fourth volume contains a list of words from the Walser dialect of Obersaxen , written with the help of J. P. Henni and J. Janka . To this end, Bühler put together a " Chrestomathie der Bündnerdialekt", a collection of texts in various Bündner dialects. The unpublished supplements were bequeathed by Bühler's sons to the Swiss Idioticon in 1914 and integrated there into its source material.

Publications

dictionary

• Davos in its Walser dialect. A contribution to the knowledge of this high throat and to the Swiss Idiotikon.
  • I. Lexicographical part. Heidelberg 1870 (1st fascicle 1869; 2nd edition 1872).
  • II. Synonymous part. Heidelberg 1875.
  • III. Homonymous and grammatical part. Heidelberg 1879. - Also contains the first part of the Chrestomathie of the Bündner dialects (primarily the Walser and Hohenstaufen dialects).
  • IV. First and main supplement. The Obersaxer dialect in its own way. Heidelberg / Aarau [?] 1886. - Also contains the second part of the Chrestomathie of the Bündner dialects (primarily the Walser and Hohenstaufen dialects).

Patriotic poems

• Laus Benedicti Fontanae. 1874.
• In memoriam. De pyromanubalistariorum Helveticorum certamine. 1891.

swell

• Niklaus Bigler: Bühler, Valentin. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Valentin Bühler: Foreword. In: Davos in its Walser dialect. A contribution to the knowledge of this high throat and to the Swiss Idiotikon. Heidelberg 1870.
• M [ax] P [fister]: The extraordinary Bühler family. In: Davoser Woche 160, 1979, p. 3. - Again under the title: Die Bühler. An extraordinary family. In: Max Pfister: Davos personalities. Verlag Davoser Zeitung, Davos 1981, p. 28 f.
• Paul Zinsli : The Bündner German in Swiss-German language research. In: Rätia 4, 1941, pp. 165-174, 203.
• Report to the h. swear Department of the Interior and to the h. Governments of the subsidizing cantons on the progress of work on the Swiss German Idiotikon during 1914. [Zurich 1915], p. 15 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Publications by and about Valentin Bühler in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library

proof

1. ↑ ^{a b} Valentin Bühler: Davos in his Walser dialect. A contribution to the knowledge of this high throat and to the Swiss Idiotikon. Heidelberg 1870, foreword.
2. ↑ Report to the h. swear Department of the Interior and to the h. Governments of the subsidizing cantons on the progress of the work on the Swiss-German Idiotikon during 1914. [Zurich 1915], p. 15.