Johann Andreas Schmeller

Johann Andreas Schmeller ( born August 6 1785 Tirschenreuth; † July 27, 1852 in Munich) was a German scholar and Bavarian linguist. He is considered the founder of modern dialect research in Germany. His lasting contribution is a four-volume dictionary Bavarian, whose successor is currently being drafted Bavarian dictionary is.

Life and work

The ancestors were farmers in Waldsassener Stiftland. His parents Joseph Anton and Maria Barbara Schmeller relocated from the farming village Griesbach Tirschenreuth where the father earned his living as a basket maker ( Kürbenzäuner ). There, John was born the fifth child of the family. When he was eighteen years old, the family decided to move to richer Upper Bavaria, to escape the poor living conditions; in Regensburg, the family would be almost as he described in his memoirs, went on board a ship emigrants to emigrate on the Danube to Hungary. However, the family moved to the mother's request further south and took up his abode on a farm ( Roun -Gütl ) in Rinnberg, community Rohrbach an der Ilm, where he spent his childhood and youth more.

First he attended the village school of Pörnbach, about four miles from his residence. The village teacher recognized the talent of the boys, prompting that he was sent to the Latin school of the Benedictine monastery Scheyern. Later he moved to the high school in Ingolstadt, then to the (now ) Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich, which he completed in 1801 and his studies at the Lyceum Munich continued.

Educational interested, influenced by the Enlightenment and impressed by the ideas of the French Revolution, he went in 1804 to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in Switzerland, but had no use for him. So he was still in 1804 enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish service, and was an assistant at the newly founded school for cadets in Madrid, the Real Instituto Militar Pestalozziano. In 1809 he founded a private school in Basel, which had to be resolved in 1813. Then he returned to his homeland and became lieutenant in 1814 in an Infantry Battalion of the Bavarian army, where he was awarded the status of a case " practicirenden Civil places Officer" 1823. In 1815 he made ​​his first attempt at a grammatical representation of the Bavarian dialect, in 1821, the first volume of his phonetic alphabet and the dialects of Bavaria represented grammatically ( reprint 1929). With it, he was the founder of scientific dialectology.

In 1824 he became an associate member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1829 elected as a member of a twelve finally memberships in learned societies at home and abroad. In the years 1827-1836 he created, initially funded by the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig I, his major work, the four-volume Bavarian dictionary, which became a model and standard for all dialect dictionaries. From 1826, he lectured at the University of Munich and was honored by her in 1827 with an honorary doctorate. In the same year he became a professor at the Cadet School in Munich and in 1828 associate professor of Old German Old Germanic or language and literature at the University of Munich. In 1829 he was appointed curator of the Court and State Library, in which he served as supervisor of the manuscript department. As such, he inventoried the entire stock of 27,000 manuscripts, which were mostly passes through the secularization of the Bavarian monasteries in state ownership. In 1844 he refused the call of Munich University for a professorship of Slavic languages ​​, instead he became assistant librarian at the Bavarian State Library. In 1846 he then took the chair at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich to the chair of Old German language and literature. In 1848, he tried to be politically active by letting stand as a candidate for election to the Constituent National Assembly of the German Free Democrats club.

On July 27, 1852, he died in Munich at the cholera. His grave is in the Old South Cemetery in Munich's Isar suburb. Prior to his grave simply designed stone is an open book.

In addition to the above major works and numerous essays he edited mostly Old High German texts Munich manuscripts, as, inter alia, 1830, titled by him Heliand old Saxon Gospels Harmony, in 1832 the Old High German doomsday poem Muspilli, 1838 Ruodlieb and 1841 the Old High German translation of otherwise the Tatian, of him but ascribed to Ammonius Diatessaron. And last but not least Schmeller was 1847 in 1803 found as Carmina Burana Carmina Burana - out songs from Benediktbeuren.

Languages

Johann Andreas Schmeller controlled or dealt with following languages: Old English, Old Frisian, Ancient Greek, Old High German, Old Church Slavonic, Old Norse, Arabic, Bavarian, Danish, English, French, Gothic, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Modern Greek, Dutch, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, and heard in his later years, still lectures on Chinese.

Others

• A bust of him can be seen both in the Hall of Fame in Munich as well as in his native Tirschenreuth.
• After Johann Andreas Schmeller the scientific and linguistic school in Nabburg, the Realschule in Ismaning and secondary schools were named in Tirschenreuth and Scheyern.
• Schmeller never denied his humble origins. For his parents, he had built a grave stone on which the relief of a braided basket is, as a reminder of the simple profession of his father.