Background

This Dictionary

This project concerns the digitization of a very special historic dictionary: Karl Endemann’s Wörterbuch derSothosprache which was first published by L. Friedrichsen & Co. in Hamburg, Germany in 1911 in the series “Abhandlungen des Hamburgischen Kolonialinstituts, Reihe B. Völkerkunde, Kulturgeschichte und Sprachen,Band 4”. It is a multilingual and monodirectional dictionary; the source languages are several Sotho languagesand dialects; the target language is German.

The Author, the publishers and the rights

According to his own account, Karl Endemann spent the years 1861 – 1873 in "Transvaal" working as amissionary, where he collected the main content of the dictionary. He found time and opportunity after his retirement in 1891 to start working on it. It then took him about 7 years to write the first version of the dictionary and its revision was then published in 1911. It has since been republished in 1912 by Walter DeGruyter (the current rights owner), and the team members are currently aware of only three existing copies. The language pair treated in the dictionary, i.e. Sotho and German, makes the dictionary even more of a rarity, and at the same time, inaccessible to potential users and scholars unfamiliar with either of the two languages, see also "challenges" (on the project description page).

Endemann attempted and often succeeded in providing many of the lemmas in the dictionary with unique descriptive information, and thus we view the dictionary as an invaluable repository of linguistic and culturalinformation. Our concern is that this wealth of information may soon be lost if some effort is not made to make at least a portion of the dictionary available to a wider audience. Due to capacity constraints, we do not plan to digitize the full dictionary, only selected articles. However, the dictionary's structure does not adhere to modern lexicographical standards; hence quite an effort is necessary to reach our goal.

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