Walter Haas (Germanist)

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Walter Haas

Walter Haas (born September 14, 1942 in Lucerne ; citizen of Kriens ) is a Swiss linguist and emeritus professor of German linguistics .

Life

Haas, son of a saddler and upholsterer , attended the canton school in Lucerne from 1954 to 1958 and the cantonal teacher training college in Hitzkirch from 1958 to 1963 , after which he worked as a teacher for a year. 1964–1971 he studied Germanic philology, German literature, folklore , Swiss history and general linguistics at the universities of Zurich and Freiburg in Üechtland and in 1971 he became Elmar Seebold's assistant in Freiburg . He spent a stay in the United States from 1973–1974 as a visiting fellow at Princeton University with William G. Moulton . In 1971 Haas received his doctorate with a thesis on a parody of Lucerne folk drama from the 18th century, and in 1978 he completed his habilitation with a study on language change and language geography .

1978–1980 Haas worked as a research assistant at the language service of the Swiss Federal Chancellery in Bern and 1980–1983 under Rudolf Trüb on the Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (Volume VI) in Zurich. In 1983 he became professor at the Philipps University of Marburg and head of the German Language Atlas . In 1986 Haas returned to the University of Freiburg im Üechtland , where he was full professor for German linguistics until his retirement in 2009.

Haas is married and has one daughter. He is also a collector of card games , especially Jass cards from the 18th and 19th centuries - a time when Friborg was the most important playing card production site in Switzerland. A selection from his private collection was shown in 2002 as part of the exhibition “Playing cards - the fascination of a popular art” at the Gutenberg Museum in Freiburg.

Research and work

Haas' research focuses on dialectology and sociolinguistics , the history of science in German studies, the history of the language of German , language relations in Switzerland and standardization processes . His dialectological publications cover a wide range from the linguistic historical interpretation of recent vowel systems to the collaboration on a regional dialect dictionary to the theory and history of German-speaking Swiss dialect literature . In the area of ​​the history of science, Haas has devoted himself to the idiotism collections of the 18th century and to the Lucerne scholar Renward Brandstetter . In the field of language history and standardization, he works on the writing language of the federal estates in the 15th and 16th centuries. Haas has also written several works on the history and iconography of playing cards .

From 1982 to 2006, Haas was a member of the - old and new - Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. From 1987 to 1991 he was President of the Swiss Academic Society for German Studies and from 1995 to 2006 a member of the Commission of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences for the National Dictionaries ( Swiss Idioticon , Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande , Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana and Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun ). From 2003–2010 he was President of the Management Group of the National Research Program 56 “Linguistic Diversity and Language Competence in Switzerland”, and from 2007–2010 he was President of the International Playing Card Society .

Publications (selection)

Dialectology
  • [together with Christian Schmutz :] Sensler German dictionary. Dialect dictionary of the Sense district in the canton of Friborg including the city of Friborg and the parish of Gurmels. Deutschfreiburger Heimatkundeverein / Paulus, Freiburg, Switzerland, 2000 (Deutschfreiburger contributions to Heimatkunde 65).
  • Dialect as the language of literary works. In: Werner Besch, Ulrich Knoop, Wolfgang Putschke and Herbert Ernst Wiegand (eds.): Dialectology. A manual for German and general dialect research. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1983 (Handbooks on Linguistics and Communication Science 1.2), pp. 1637–1651.
  • Contemporary dialect literature of German-speaking Switzerland. A theoretical and historical overview. In: Michigan Germanic Studies 6 (1980), pp. 58-119.
  • Language change and language geography. Investigations into the structure of the dialect difference using the example of the Swiss-German vowel systems. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1978 (Journal for Dialectology and Linguistics, Supplements NF 30).
  • Lozärnerspròòch. A history of the Lucerne German dialect literature with an author's lexicon and a reader. Räber, Lucerne / Stuttgart 1968.
History of science
  • Renward Brandstetter as a Dialectologist. In: Robert Blust, Jürg Schneider (Ed.): A World of Words. Revisiting the Work of Renward Brandstetter (1860-1942) on Lucerne and Austronesia. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2012, pp. 33–42.
  • [Ed., With the collaboration of W. Günther Ganser, Karin Gerstner and Hanspeter von Flüe:] Provinzial word. German Idiotism Collections of the 18th Century. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1994 (Historical Word Research 3).
  • Jacob Grimm and the German dialects. Steiner, Stuttgart 1990 (Journal for Dialectology and Linguistics, Supplements NF 65).
  • The dictionary of the Swiss German language. Trial via a national institution (PDF; 45.7 MB). Edited by the editors of the Swiss German dictionary. Huber, Frauenfeld 1981.
Language history and standardization processes
  • "On harm transformed." On the handling of the early reprinters with Luther's Germanization of the New Testament. In: The writer as interpreter. Edited by Werner Besch and Thomas Klein. Special issue for volume 127 (2008) of the magazine for German philology, pp. 119–149.
  • Approaches to a theory of language change on the phonetic level. In: Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann and Stefan Sonderegger (eds.): History of language. A handbook on the history of the German language and its research. 2nd, completely revised and enlarged edition. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1998 (Handbooks for Linguistics and Communication Science 2.1), pp. 836–850.
  • Franz Alois Schumacher's "Isaac". A folk drama parody from the 18th century. Text and Investigations. Rex, Lucerne 1975 (Lucerne Historical Publications 4).
Language conditions in Switzerland
  • The language situation in German-speaking Switzerland and the concept of diglossia. In: Helen Christen (Ed.): Dialect, Regiolect and Standard Language in the Social and Temporal Space. Contributions to the 1st Congress of the International Society for Dialectology of German, Marburg / Lahn, 5. – 8. March 2003. Edition Praesens, Vienna 2004, pp. 81–110.
  • German-speaking Switzerland. In: Hans Bickel, Robert Schläpfer (ed.): The four-language Switzerland. 2nd, revised edition. Sauerländer, Aarau 2000 (Sprachlandschaft 25 series), pp. 57–138.
Playing card research
  • [Ed., Together with Daniel Grütter and Max Ruh :] The tarot game in Switzerland. Tarocks of the 18th and 19th centuries in the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen from September 17, 2004 to March 27, 2005. Schaffhausen 2004.
  • The Freiburg playing card maker Alphonse Favre. In: Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 71 (1994), pp. 173-212.

Honors

  • Raphael Berthele, Helen Christen, Sibylle Germann and Ingrid Hove (eds.): The German written language and the regions. Historical questions in a new perspective. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003 (Studia Linguistica Germanica 65) [publication on the occasion of Walter Haas' 60th birthday].

literature

  • Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 2014. 26th edition in 4 volumes. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, p. 1199.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Schmutz: To play and collect, in: Freiburger Nachrichten of June 26, 2002.
personal data
SURNAME Haas, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss linguist and professor emeritus for German linguistics
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Lucerne