COLUMN: Carillon Flashback, February 5, 2004 – Low German dictionary reflects a lifetime of work

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This article was published 27/10/2023 (633 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The long-awaited Mennonite Low German Dictionary (Mennonitische Plattdeutsches Woerterbuch) is off the press and will be formally launched at the Mennonite Heritage Village.

Author Jack Thiessen will read from the dictionary, which he has been working on for decades. Thiessen, the son of Mennonite immigrants to Canada from the Old Colony in Ukraine, was an assistant professor of German at the University of Winnipeg before his retirement.

In 1961, he completed a doctoral dissertation on Plautdietsch in Marburg, Germany. There he made contact with German dialectologists, which led to a lifetime of friendly collaboration on various projects.

Fluent in German, as well as Low German, Thiessen has translated a number of works from High German to English and vice versa.

The new Low German dictionary is hailed as a “major achievement”, which will do much to maintain and strengthen the language, or dialect. Critics say the volume “far exceeds expectations” and will serve as a reference for people seeking to re-establish their mother tongue.

The publication of the first edition of Jack Thiessen’s Low German dictionary represented the life’s work of the New Bothwell resident, who began the project in 1958.

In a 1995 interview, Thiessen, who was expecting the dictionary to be published “in a couple of years”, told The Carillon he had collected words from every Low German conversation he had ever heard. The former professor of German at the University of Winnipeg says he remembers always walking around with a notebook.

He also interviewed German refugees for the project, finding the vocabulary of the Mennonites among them to be different from that of other German-speaking people.

The dictionary represents a million hours of work, Thiessen suggested.

Formal work on the project began in 1961, with a university dissertation on Low German, he noted.

In the early 1990’s, Thiessen went into partnership with two European professors, who were experts in the field of language and dialects.

“We three decided to write a two-volume Mennonite/Prussian/Low German dictionary.”

One of his partners in the work died in 1992 or Thiessen said he would have remained in Germany where people respected this type of work.

The Low German dialect has its historical roots in the west Prussian region of Germany, Thiessen explained.

“More than 90 percent of the more than 30,000 words in the dictionary are clearly Prussian “with a hard core of three to four percent Dutch,” he said.

“There are at least 250 words in the Mennonite dialect which are obviously Dutch.”

A number of other words are represented as well. “There is even a Swedish word.”

The dictionary includes Low German words with definitions in German and English.