Jacob Grimm and the Lithuanian language - II. Etymological research in the Deutsches Wörterbuch

Jacob Grimm's Lithuanian studies culminated in his work on the German Dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch; DWB) in the 1850s and 60s. The principles of Grimm's etymological research differ from today's linguistics in various ways. In the first part of my article, I explain Grimm's basic idea of an original sensual or concrete meaning (sinnliche Bedeutung), which he contrasted with more recent abstract meaning(s) (abgezogene Bedeutungen]) of words. Identifying the sensual meaning of words in the history of (Indo-)European languages, Grimm established proto-concepts (Urbegrijfe) that structured the basic semantic fields of word families. Using the example of the German Berg 'mountain' and the Gothic verb bairgan 'to protect', Grimm reconstructed the proto-concept 'protecting place' for German Berg 'mountain'. The Baltic languages also helped Grimm to find Urbegriffe in his fields of research, including folk literature, mythology, and legal history. This paper also includes statistics on the use of the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Old Prussian languages in the DWB articles written by the Brothers Grimm and in an appendix that registers all the Baltic words and phrases cited by the Brothers Grimm in the DWB. The brothers wrote more than 51,000 dictionary entries. References to Lithuanian can be found in 226 entries, to Latvian in 90 entries and to Old Prussian in only 5 entries. My paper tries to make clear the form and function of these Baltic references in the DWB and it introduces the main baltistic sources the Brothers Grimm used during their work. As an example of nineteenth century German philology, which combined studies in folklore, history, and religion with linguistic research, this article discusses Jacob Grimm's assumptions about the Lithuanian God of thunder, Perkūnas. Grimm stated that the Germanic words for 'mountain/ such as Gothic fairguni or German Berg, are cognates of the name Perkūnas. This example illustrates his method of researching mythological and historic substrata for decades and his interest in discovering the linguistic and cultural relationships between (Indo-)European cultures by using linguistic methods. In conclusion, I present some of Jacob Grimm's Lithuanian annotations in his personal copies of the DWB