When language changes, that is, moves with the times, does it actually age?

Is she rejuvenating?

In any case, people who live far away from their homeland often have to hear when they visit their homeland that their mother tongue is outdated.

It's the same with dictionaries.

So it can happen between all the languages ​​of the world that someone looking for the meaning of foreign words wants to look something up and undertakes an involuntary journey through time of several decades - sometimes into nothing.

Axel Weidemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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When this newspaper reported in September 1997 about the plan to compile a new, comprehensive Japanese-German dictionary, the first edition of the then current standard work, the "Great Japanese-German Dictionary" by Kinji Kimura, "the Kimura" for short, was already sixty Year old.

Comparatively modern words like long-term care insurance (

kaigo-hoken

) or remote control (

rimokon

, based on the English "remote control") were not to be found in the Kimura at the time.

But those were just two of the many reasons why, 25 years ago, a group of experts at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DJI) in Tokyo decided to put together a more up-to-date dictionary for teaching Japanese and German.

The last volume, "O - Z", of this project of the century has now been published.

The project was originally set to run for five years

But the new "Big Japanese-German Dictionary" has a rocky road behind it.

After the first volume was published in 2009, it was said that the volumes, which should be three times the size of the Kimura, should be available by the end of 2015.

But the project was in jeopardy.

As early as 2008, it became known that the DJI no longer wanted to continue funding the dictionary.

It was saved, among others, by the Japanologist and co-editor Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, who relocated the project to the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2018, by Peter K. Kapitza, the owner of Iudicium Verlag, who fed the project with his own funds, and by the German Research Foundation and sponsors who support it with donations.

But saved above all,

because the co-editor Jürgen Stalph as the central figure and the numerous employees did not allow themselves to be misled.

Fall down seven times, get up eight times (

nana korobi, ya oki

), is a Japanese proverb.

Jürgen Stalph recalls: “The project started with the creation of one new position at the DJI: mine.

This should ensure that all traditional scientific tasks of the institute can continue to be carried out without tying up additional staff." In general, it is hard to get such long-term scientific projects off the ground: "In the DJI it was hardly possible to continue for more than five years planning, so that follow-up applications were constantly being written, the need to be re-established, the good course to be proven, the slowness of progress to be disputed.” For these reasons, it was also difficult to recruit capable people.

"On the one hand, annual or even work contracts lasting a few months are hardly lucrative, on the other hand, well-trained philologists, linguists,