Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch. 6. Auflage, überarbeitet und um die Glossen erweitert (review)

This revised edition of Rudolf Schützeichel's Old High German dictionary carefully takes into account new documents and new treatments of existing monuments. The addition of gloss words has expanded the dictionary from originally some 12,000 words to about 39,000 total entries (according to Schützeichel, pp. 23–24).

The addition of the glosses corrects a skewed presentation of OHG based on literary monuments alone. The reader is confronted now with a rich variety of previously unnoted word derivations. For example, if we look at the entries under mund 'Mund,' the 5th edition listed only muntloh 'Schlund' as a derivation; we now have also mundazzen, mundbiz, and mundfol. The older version has ars "Arsch, Gesäß" while the new edition adds arsbelli, arsdarm, arsdruos, arskizzilin, arslingûn, arsloh, and arswis.

Users may be a little surprised not to find definitions of these new words in what is after all a dictionary. Instead, we are given a reference to Schützeichel's 2004 12–volume edition of the glosses (Althochdeutscher und Altsächsischer Glossenwortschatz, Tübingen: Niemeyer). It is understandable that to provide definitions for all of these new entries would have been a formidable task, but it would have improved the usefulness of the new edition, especially given the larger treatise's price of nearly 800 Euro. Particularly helpful would be a presentation of each gloss with the (usually) Latin word of the original.

As with the earlier edition, the dictionary does not clearly designate base forms that are unattested and reconstructed. Nor does it offer a needed distinction between multivalent grammatical assignment (for example, for gender) within the linguistic system as opposed to uncertainty as to grammatical assignment because of a lack of diagnostic examples. Thus, a word listed as masculine or neuter may be multigendered, or it may only occur in ambiguous contexts.

The introduction to the dictionary has now been shortened from about 70 pages in the 1995 edition to just 24 pages. Part of this abbreviation was achieved by using a very small font, so small as to be challenging to aging eyes. More troublesome by far, on p. 19 Schützeichel states that out of the need to save space, he has dispensed with a bibliography altogether. This is not a step in the right direction, precisely because one of the audiences of this dictionary will be students and scholars who are NOT overly familiar with the works "wie sie in der Fachwelt bekannt und gebräuchlich sind" (p. 19). The minimally necessary bibliographic material that is offered under the individual sigla of the monuments is inconsistent and incomplete.

The ultimate purpose of bibliographic exactitude, of course, is to help others find the works in question and to place one's scholarship within a context. If your audience consists, for example, of students and co-workers in your own institution, where Festschriften are arranged in the Seminarbibliothek according to the person honored, it is appropriate to refer to them by the name of the Festschrift recipient. If, however, you are writing for a larger and perhaps international audience, it behooves you to give more detailed and complete information, not to assume that your reader will be familiar with, e.g., an abbreviation like PBB for Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. One could argue, on the other hand, that with the brute force capabilities of modern computer search engines such exactitude is less needful than it used to be. For example, if one is able to do an online search for a Festschrift using multiple variables, one may be able to find it easily despite labeling that in the old days would have been mystifying.

These quibbles aside, it is my pleasant task to thank Rudolf Schützeichel for this wonderful addition to our storehouse of information about the earliest German.