Low and behold

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/02/2019 (2099 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A unique dictionary bridging Low German and English, unavailable for more than a decade, is back in print and ready to serve another generation of Plautdietsch aficionados.

But the road that led to the revised edition of the Mennonite Low German Dictionary, a reference work packed with more than 25,000 two-way definitions, was a winding one.

It began 18 months ago, and followed two earlier attempts to reprint the dictionary in England and Germany.

Author Jack Thiessen of New Bothwell met with Ernest Braun, a Tourond-based amateur Mennonite historian, and Gerhard Ens, a history professor at the University of Alberta, to consider a straight reprint of the 2003 edition.

In August of last year, the trio learned the dictionary’s original publisher, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, had no plans for a reprint, but was willing to return the copyright to Thiessen.

Braun and Ens then embarked on a comprehensive revision process. But when they received the master files, they discovered portions were incomplete, and were forced to rebuild a section of the dictionary from older, unformatted drafts.

Braun estimated he and Ens spent more than 200 hours combing through entries to correct typos, update phonetic spellings, and revise definitions.

Last month, after hiring a designer to convert the files into an acceptable format, they turned over the updated manuscript to Friesens Corp. of Altona for a run of 300 copies. (They created three copies of the new master files, to simplify future reprints.)

As Thiessen signed a stack of copies at Mennonite Heritage Village this past Saturday, he said seeing his beloved dictionary back in print made him feel “about 20 pounds lighter.”

The retired University of Winnipeg German Studies professor, born in Gnadenfeld, near Grunthal, is well-known for his extensive translation work, which includes everything from short stories to historical documents, and for his scholarship, at home and abroad, on the Low German language and its antecedents.

As he wrote in its original preface, Thiessen’s 500-page dictionary, which grew out of a slimmer volume he published in 1977, strove to “embody a time and culture” by including Low German adages and aphorisms.

The hybrid dialect, which borrows from languages as diverse as Yiddish and Swedish, elbowed out Dutch to become Prussia’s lingua franca. Like many, Thiessen prizes Low German’s near-untranslatable glosses, most evident in its humour and turns of phrase.

“The marrow of my bones is Plautdietsch,” he said, adding he “feels more at home in the world” when he speaks it.

His favourite Low German word is one of Dutch descent, Leef’tolijch, which his dictionary defines as one who is lovable, gracious, or amiable.

Thiessen said he enjoys hearing from those who consult his dictionary, including scholars and novelists. He recalled one reader who thanked him for the pang of nostalgia that accompanied his rediscovery of the word Bobbat, a raisin stuffing for roast chicken.

For Braun, stories such as this illustrate the enduring importance of Low German in Mennonite culture.

“I want this to rekindle interest in what is very much a living language,” he said.

In Steinbach, copies of the revised Mennonite Low German Dictionary are available at the MHV gift shop and Die Mennonitische Post bookstore.