Glossarium

Traditionally, the news situation is thin at the beginning of a new year. So, on January 2, Red Baron read an article in the Sunday edition of the Badische Zeitung about a General German Glossary.

Well, I wrote about the Allgemeines Deutsches Glossarium already in June 2018, and now four years later, the mammoth project has come to an end. Let us recall:

 

©Basler Universitätsbibliothek

This Allgemeine Deutsche Glossarium is a sensation in the German-speaking world, containing over 100,000 keywords and terms compiled during the first half of the 18th century by Johann Jakob Spreng, a professor in Basel.

Since then, this treasure of compiled words had gathered dust in the university library. It was discovered more by chance in 2014. Linguist Heinrich Löffler had stumbled upon the alphabetical dictionary written on 100,000 slips of paper glued onto 20,000 pages gathered in 20 manuscript volumes. The rest of the paper slips were sorted into envelopes. Thanks to him and numerous helpers and supporters, the mammoth task of editorial indexing was completed and issued in a seven-volume edition for further studies.

 

Red Baron acquired the layman's edition for his browsing entertainment. As my readers know, languages are one of my hobbies.

Although in 1742, Spreng was the founder of the "German Society" in Basel, he had to struggle throughout his life. Educated as a Protestant theologian, he worked as an educator, preacher, and pastor. As late as 1743, Spreng became professor honorarius of German rhetoric and poetry, later of Swiss history and Greek at the University of Basel.

While Latin was still the dominant language in higher education, Spreng advocated courses held in German at the university. But many terms and words did not exist in German. Spreng assumed that in the linguistic vocabulary of all areas of life, there was an appearance of  "common Germanic affinities" to individual languages. So he started to examine words from various sources for traces of Germanic origin, i.e., Old and Middle High German, but also foreign languages and dialects, to make German a scientifically sound and standard language.

Spreng, a linguistic purist, piloted his issue when he Germanized "Latin terms," e.g., Akademie (academy) into Erzschule (arch school), Mathematiker (mathematician) into Wisskünstler (knowledge artist), Studenten (students) into Zuchtsöhne (sons of discipline), and Professor into Hochlehrer (high teacher). This word is pretty close to the modern Hochschullehrer frequently used for professors.

With his neologisms, Spreng stands in the tradition of the Fruitbearing Society during and after the Thirty Years' War.

Students said about the "eccentric" Spreng, "Now he is working on a German dictionary or lexicon of appallingly large size, which, as it is said, gives many folios. Apart from that, he is an oeconomus, has many debts, and it is said that the expenses for books, maps, and other scientific objects will ruin him completely."

Spreng’s Glossarium would have been the largest German dictionary of the 18th century, surpassed only by the "German Dictionary" of the Brothers Grimm. According to Spreng the glossary is „kein trokenes Wörterbuch, (…) sondern mit annemlichen und merkwürdigen Anzügen durchaus versehen, das nicht nur Sprachforschern, sondern überhaubt auch allerley Gelehrten, Standespersonen, Kanzleybeamten, und Liebhabern schöner Wissenschaften nützlich und gleichsam unentbährlich werde (not a dull dictionary, (...) but one that is thoroughly furnished with interesting and strange features which will not only be useful and, as it were, indispensable to linguists, but also to all kinds of scholars, registrars, clerks, and lovers of fine art.)“

Spreng had neither found the public interest nor the money to publish his opus magnum during his lifetime. Too sad.

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