A New Japanese-German Dictionary Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit Mediation between cultures and societies is based on knowledge of the respective languages. Nothing, in other words, is more fundamental than the ability to communicate linguistically with one's counterpart, and dictionaries are arguably the most important practical tools in opening up the other language. These are the opening words of a foreword that I wrote in 1999 for a bibliography of bilingual Japanese and German dictionaries and glossaries.1 Aiming to provide a systematic overview of Japanese-German and German-Japanese lexicography from 1792 to 1998, the bibliography lists 1,011 titles, 85 percent of which the compilers examined directly. It was the preliminary step to a much more ambitious project: the compilation of an encyclopedic and up-to-date Japanese-German dictionary, a project animated by the same conviction expressed in the words quoted above. The first volume of this dictionary, Großes japanisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (Comprehensive Japanese-German Dictionary; abbreviated as GJDW), appeared in 2009.2 The publication in 2022 of the third and final volume is an occasion to revisit the project's rationale and its larger implications. How does it fit within the history of Western-language lexicography on Japan? What inspired it and how was it implemented? What are the dictionary's distinctive features? What is the significance of a work such as this in the twenty-first-century context, including the rapid growth of digitalization and AI and the other consequences of globalization? The following reflections offer an insider's perspective on these questions. [End Page 295] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Pfizmaier, Wörterbuch der japanischen Sprache, p. 3. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb10522260?page=24,25. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Excerpt from Lehmann, Woerterbuch der japanischen und deutschen Sprache, reproduced in Stalph and Suppanschitsch, Wörterbücher und Glossare, p. 10. Courtesy of Iudicium. [End Page 296] Western-Language Lexicography on Japan Foreign-language dictionaries serve two different audiences: they explain the vocabulary and idioms of the source language for users of the target language, and they provide guidance for users of the source language who wish to express themselves in the target language. The earliest Japanese–foreign-language dictionaries familiar to us were compiled primarily from the standpoint of explaining the source language. The most notable instance is probably the famous Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam compiled and published by the Jesuits in Nagasaki in 1603, a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary prized by scholars for the insights it offers into the Japanese language of the time.3 The first Japanese-German dictionary, August Pfizmaier's (1808–1887) Wörterbuch der japanischen Sprache (Dictionary of the Japanese Language), published in Vienna in 1851, is another early example of a European dictionary aimed at elucidating Japanese; see figure 1.4 Envisioned as a work of immense scope, it presented the Japanese terms on one leaf in lithographic form as kanji with kana glosses; on the facing typeset leaf, it gave alphabetic transliterations with German and brief English definitions. The first volume—in the event, the only one to appear—covered the letter "i," the first letter of the Japanese iroha syllabary, in 1,046 entries over eighty "pages" (each consisting of two facing leaves). Although an impressive demonstration of the skill of the Austrian imperial court printers, the Hofdruckerei, a world leader in printing technology at the time, Pfizmaier's work, which he compiled without direct experience of Japan, remains essentially an oddity in terms of content. In the words of Jürgen Stalph and Harald Suppanschitsch, it is "a useless but enduring monument of solitary Japanological erudition."5 The opening of Japan to wider foreign access not long after the publication of Pfizmaier's dictionary saw renewed efforts on the part of Westerners resident in Japan to gain and provide insight into the Japanese language. A leader in this area was James Curtis Hepburn (1815–1911), whose A Japanese and English Dictionary (Waei gorin shūsei 和英語林集成) was first published in 1867. The third revised and expanded edition, published in 1886, contains over 35,000 entries.6 The successive editions of Hepburn...
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Oct 9, 2024
Ivan D Kachurin 
Open Access