[HN Gopher] The Brothers Grimm: A Biography
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The Brothers Grimm: A Biography
Author : benbreen
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-11-07 06:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theamericanscholar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theamericanscholar.org)
| cafard wrote:
| For those interested:
| https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=A00001
| Archelaos wrote:
| My favourite entry is the one for "Armee" (army).
| folli wrote:
| Haha, do you know of any other such gems?
| Archelaos wrote:
| "Amtmannin": the nickname of their mother.
|
| "Adelung": alludes to a predecessor dictionary editor.[1]
| The old high german word "adalunc" in its etymology was
| made up.
|
| I became aware of these lemmata through this article:
| https://www.welt.de/kultur/article4127427/Es-war-einmal-
| das-...
|
| [1] Johann Christoph Adelung (1732-1806):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung
| cenamus wrote:
| Oh linguistic purism, never seems to change
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| Parsing "Magic: The German" made my brain glitch
| mandevil wrote:
| I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to
| build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A
| Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to
| the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same
| process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz
| and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who
| lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as
| German.
|
| In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom
| in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present
| situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen
| Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something
| invented because it made the factories and the trains run better.
| It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia
| newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people
| 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a
| "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in
| an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock
| tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had
| a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't
| really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds
| of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.
|
| 1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > town clock tower
|
| breaking days into two sets of 12 hours, and sixty minutes per
| hour with sixty seconds to a minute, has been practiced since
| Biblical times, no?
| mandevil wrote:
| I mean, I think two sets of 12 hours dates back to Ancient
| Egypt, basically as old as the Pyramids, so quite a bit older
| than the Bible itself. But note that most of those cultures
| used equal divisions per day, expanding or shrinking the
| length of an hour depending on the season, e.g. Egyptian
| water clocks would have different gauges for each month. So
| they would hold dawn or dusk constant and expand or shrink
| the sizes of hours rather than our system of holding hours
| constant and letting dawn and dusk move around. Constant
| hours are a much more recent invention, generally speaking
| for most people (people who worked with the stars excepted)
| starting up around the time of railways, when it first
| started to matter what time was for an area larger than the
| hearing radius of a clock bell tower. (I don't care what time
| your town has versus my town, so who cares that your 5th hour
| of the night is more like my 4 hours and 45 minutes of the
| night? Until we need to run a train all the way through both
| of our towns and now we need to synchronize!)
| ProAm wrote:
| How difficult or easy was that book as a read? Sounds
| interesting but Im hoping its somewhat casual?
| mandevil wrote:
| You really need a good grounding in European history to
| follow it, I would say. Medieval/Renaissance is where I'm
| weakest so it's where I struggled the most, but he covers
| over 1800 years of history so he moves pretty fast and I
| would often have to flip back to remember who Ulrich von
| Huten was. I don't remember many difficult words or anything,
| just a lot of assumed context.
| _glass wrote:
| One has to be careful not to backdate our current understanding
| of identity. Identities were rich and very fluid, being German
| was an identity, which the Dutch ("Deutsch") had until very
| recently. But for example religion was very important as an
| identity, as well as even European once like being a Frank. The
| Roman Empire was much more important than often credited in
| German/Prussian history, because it was precisely part of the
| nation building process to downplay the Empire, to build a
| Prussian Germany. My parents are boomers, and I remember how my
| mother was complaining about Prussian coffee. Also in
| Highschool I was learning Saxonian history, right now my
| daughters are also learning Hamburg's history.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Some very nice writing here by author Anne Matthews. I especially
| liked her closing paragraph:
|
| A shy girl in London loved these stories once. So did a boy from
| South Africa, and one in Belfast, and another in California. When
| their own narratives flowered, Beatrix Potter, J. R. R. Tolkien,
| C. S. Lewis, and George Lucas knew whom to thank. Without the
| labors of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, there would be no Peter
| Rabbit, no Middle-earth, no Narnia, and definitely no Star Wars.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I wonder why the most important element of their political
| biography is not mentioned: they were among the Gottingen
| Seven.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttingen_Seven
| adrian_b wrote:
| This is a short book review.
|
| I have looked at the book contents and large parts of two book
| chapters are about this event, in one chapter about the
| circumstances that lead to the protest and in the other about
| its consequences.
|
| Thanks for the Wikipedia link, I was not aware that the very
| important physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber (for whom the magnetic
| flux unit is named), took also part in this protest.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| My favorite book about the Brothers Grimm is "Fairy Tales: A New
| History" by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.
|
| She argues persuasively that the conventional origin normally
| told about the Grimm's fairy tales---that they were recited by
| old peasant women remembering the ancient oral folktales of the
| Germanic people---is not really true.
|
| In fact the tales mainly came from middle class storytellers. And
| the two most important sources of the Grimm's tales were two
| Italian literary story collections from the Renaissance by
| Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.
|
| It upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the origins of
| fairy tales.
| ttepasse wrote:
| The historical dictionary is the Deutsches Worterbuch with a long
| history:
|
| The Brothers Grimm started working on it 1838. Wilhelm died
| around the letter D, Jacob at the entry for "Frucht". Afterwards
| other Germanists started continuing that work, later Bismarck
| provided state funding. At the start of the 20. Century the
| Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin took over the project with
| major work in Gottingen.
|
| Then WWI, Weimar Republic, Hyperinflation, Hitler, WWII.
|
| After the war the work was continued with Gottingen in West
| Germany and the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, East
| Germany collaborating. The final volume was published in 1961,
| with a sources supplement in 1971. In 2006 a project was started
| to update A-F to modern standards, finished in 2016.
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