author
Marcus Bachman Lambert
b. 1862
Best known for preserving the rich flavor of Pennsylvania German speech, this early 20th-century language writer compiled practical guides that helped readers navigate both everyday German and regional dialect. His work still stands out for its close attention to how people actually spoke.
1 Audiobook
Handbook of German Idioms
by Marcus Bachman Lambert
About the author
Born in 1862, Marcus Bachman Lambert was an American language writer and lexicographer whose surviving work centers on German and Pennsylvania German. Records from Project Gutenberg and library catalogs link him to Handbook of German Idioms and to A Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect, a reference work that reflects serious study of a distinctive American speech community.
Lambert's writing was practical as well as scholarly. Handbook of German Idioms was designed to help learners and teachers with expressions that do not translate word for word, while his Pennsylvania German dictionary gathered regional vocabulary in a form that readers could study and preserve. Together, these books suggest an author deeply interested in the way language lives in daily use.
Although detailed biographical information about his personal life is hard to confirm from the sources found here, his books give him a clear place in the history of lexicography and German-American language study. For listeners interested in dialect, culture, and the craft of words, Lambert is an appealing figure from a world of careful, patient scholarship.