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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Wenker, Georg (1852–1911)

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Georg Wenker (1852–1911) was the founder of a) dialect cartography and b) of the ‘indirect method’ in dialectology. From the very beginning (1877), his maps were empirically based on some 40 Standard German sentences, the so-called 40 ‘Wenker sentences,’ composed under prestructural aspects with regard to the historical grammar and, consequently, to the structural approach to dialects in the Kleiner Deutscher Sprachatlas (see Veith et al., 1984–1999). Their translation into local dialects was done by public school children assisted; their teachers assisted them and wrote the translations down (‘indirect method’). This method of exploring was different from the direct method used, e.g., for the French linguistic atlas (ALF) and its data collection (1897–1901), based on a face-to-face phonetic transcription.