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In the first preface to his German historical-dictionary, Deutsches Wörterbuch, Jacob Grimm envisions the work becoming "a household necessity," which "would eagerly be read, often with reverence."1He goes on to ask:
why should the father not pull up a couple words and, together with the boys, go through them in evenings while testing their language skills and refreshing his own? The mother would happily listen. Women, with their innate motherly wit and in the interest of maintaining good maxims, often have a genuine desire to practice their natural feeling for language ( Sprachgefühl). (Grimm, J. 1854, XIII2)
His vision starkly evokes imagery of Protestant bible-study, and therefore sounds a bit absurd when applied to a dictionary - and a highly technical one at that. As one might imagine, things didn't exactly go as Grimm hoped. The dictionary volumes produced by Jacob - with one volume by his brother, Wilhelm - only sold about half their print run, and it was heavily critiqued and branded as a work of academic elitism. Nonetheless, the project was groundbreaking in the history of lexicography in its attempt to compile an historical inventory of a living language. It would directly inspire similar works in France, the Netherlands, and what became The Oxford English Dictionary in Britain.
However, Jacob Grimm's work on the dictionary between 1838 and 1863 culminates in something quite different from present characterizations of a dictionary as a quick reference tool. It would be self-proclaimed as comprehensive, but offer only a selective range of authors in its quotation evidences and a limited time period of coverage. Moreover, its presentation is notably marked by a lack of definitions, inconsistent treatment of entries, prose-like discussions, speculative analysis, self-referential discourse, and inconsistencies between his and his brother's different volumes of the work. 3
Given these features, the Grimms' work on their dictionary, which was predominantly the work of Jacob, has largely been seen as a failure - whether owing to ill-conceived implementation (Mellor 1972; Horlitz 1991), or a perceived subversion of scholarly objectivity for political purposes (a view taken by Walter Boehlich in a series of popular West German magazine articles throughout the 1950s-60s). 4But an examination of primary sources instead shows a consistent...