Dictionary for elementary schools

The Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools) is a spelling dictionary for Austrian village children, compiled by Wittgenstein while he was a primary school teacher and published in Vienna in 1926. After the Tractatus it is the only book he published in his lifetime. It contains no philosophy at all, and that is exactly what makes it interesting.

What it is and how it came about

After the First World War Wittgenstein gave away his fortune, trained as a teacher and from 1920 to 1926 taught in poor villages in Lower Austria: Trattenbach, Puchberg am Schneeberg and Otterthal. His pupils were farmers' and workers' children who spoke dialect at home and struggled with written German.

Spelling was the daily battle. The dictionaries available were either too big and expensive for these schools or too thin to be useful. So Wittgenstein first dictated word lists, about 2,500 words, which the children copied into their own notebooks. Out of that classroom practice grew a printed book. He wrote the preface in Otterthal in April 1925, and the Viennese school publisher Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky brought out the dictionary in 1926. It is a slim volume of some forty pages with, according to the Wittgenstein Initiative, close to 6,000 entries.

Wittgenstein left teaching in April 1926, shortly after an incident in Otterthal in which he struck a pupil who collapsed. His years as a teacher were marked by real dedication and by harshness that many former pupils remembered.

What it contains

The book is a plain alphabetical list of words, with very few explanations. What stands out is the selection. Wittgenstein chose the words his pupils actually used and misspelled, not the ones a committee thought they ought to know. He included everyday Austrian and dialect words from mountain life, such as Alm (alpine pasture) and Sennerin (dairymaid), next to standard German, and he left out foreign and learned words the children would never need.

The preface explains the idea. A child who can look a word up can be held responsible for getting it right.

Nur das Wörterbuch macht es möglich, den Schüler für die Rechtschreibung seiner Arbeit voll verantwortlich zu machen …

Only the dictionary makes it possible to hold the pupil fully responsible for the spelling of his work …

Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, Geleitwort (1925)

This preface was not printed in the 1926 book. It survives as a typescript (Ts-205 in the Bergen catalogue) and was published later.

How to read it

Nobody reads a dictionary from A to Z, and you need not either. The interesting parts are the preface, which is short and clear, and a few pages of entries to get a sense of the choices. The German text, preface and word list, is freely available from the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project. In 2020 the first English translation appeared as Word Book, translated by Bettina Funcke, with drawings by Paul Chan and an introduction by Désirée Weber (Badlands Unlimited). The original 1926 edition is rare. A facsimile reprint appeared in Vienna in 1977.

Why it matters

On the surface the dictionary is a footnote. Yet many readers see a thread running from this classroom to the later philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations opens with a child learning words, and keeps returning to teaching, training and the way we learn to use words in practice. Ideas like language games and meaning as use look like what you might conclude after six years of watching children learn to read and write in a village school. The British Wittgenstein Society has published work on this connection.

Honesty requires a caveat: Wittgenstein himself never drew this line, and how much the teaching years shaped the later work is a matter of interpretation. What is certain is that the dictionary shows a side of him rarely seen in the philosophy: practical, patient with detail, and deeply concerned with how ordinary people actually speak.

Verdict

Read this if you are curious about Wittgenstein the person, if you teach, or if you want to see where his interest in ordinary language and learning might have started. Read the preface and browse the entries; an hour is enough. Do not expect philosophical arguments: the philosophy here is in what he chose to include, and in the conviction that a child deserves a tool made for the words of his own life.