Stadtgeschichtsschreibung in sprachwissenschaftlichem Studium. Casus: Grünberg in Schlesien / Zielona Góra
Urban historiography in linguistic studies: the case of Grünberg in Silesia / Zielona Góra

Summary/Abstract: In 1922, a monumental monograph on the history of the city of Zielona Góra was published. It was authored by Hugo Schmidt, the city archivist. In 2021, a translation and research study devoted to the analysis of the first part of the work was published. This paper discusses the problems of this historiographical-linguistic study and the reasons why a study of this kind has not, as yet, been carried out. The study is based on the contents of Schmidt’s book, but its research depth extends as far as the analysis of the sources used by Schmidt, namely source texts that no longer exist. As they are mostly manuscripts, they require specialised expertise in the reading and interpreting of old language forms. Schmidt made a transcript of the most important source which was a late-18th-century chronicle by Samuel Reiche, a manuscript whose understanding, especially at the level of historical-linguistic nuances, requires special palaeographic and historical-linguistic competence. The assets of the study discussed in this paper include: 1) the work is highly interdisciplinary; to define its conception, it was necessary to develop an innovative methodological framework which, while fitting into the instrumentarium of a linguist, makes the incorporation of historical material possible; 2) the work required taking into account the methods and research specificity of numerous linguistic subdisciplines. Its interdisciplinarity extends not only to the history of Lower Silesia, but also to the history of language, palaeography, the theory of linguistic transformations, dialectology, the relationship between phonetics and grapheme, etymology and historical grammar; 3) all the texts included in the first part of the monograph, not only Schmidt’s own words from 1922, but also quotations, e.g. in Early New High German, have been translated into Polish and appended with explanatory notes.

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