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Watermark Terminology
In some way, the “Bernstein Project” is reminiscent of the
Tower of Babel. At the end of the failed project in the Old
Testament, the building of the tower succumbed to the
confusion of languages. In the “Bernstein Project”, the language
confusion is at the beginning, since the various project
partners have, with their watermark collections, each
brought their own terminology to the project. The large
number of different watermark forms is reflected in the
wide variations in the terminology used to describe them;
moreover, the collections are often based on completely different
classification systems.
When integrating the different watermark collections, as
the Bernstein-Portal plans to do, settling such terminological
differences plays an important role. The confusion of
languages, to pick up our opening metaphor again, must
be eliminated in order to create a solid foundation. Watermarks
with the same motif and the same characteristics
must be described with the same terms if research in a
common database is to be possible. For such an integrated
database, the terminology being used is an important operator.
The main goal in forming a unified terminology is, in the
end, to have standardized descriptions for watermarks, descriptions
that can also be used in the future to record newly
discovered watermarks and integrate them into the Bernstein-Portal.
An important step towards a general descriptive standard
as foreseen by the “Bernstein Project” is a comparison of
the terminology used by the large watermark collections
that already exist: Piccard-Online, WILC, and WZMA. A
comparison of this sort was already conducted between
Piccard-Online and WZMA a number of years ago; in order
to realize the planned integration of WILC into the Bernstein-Portal,
it was also necessary to compare its various
motif groups to those of Piccard-Online. A short sketch of
the process will illuminate what sort of difficulties this presented.
First, for each motif group of the WILC a corresponding
motif was sought in Piccard-Online. Of the approximately
540 motif groups (descriptions), in nearly 70% of
the cases it was possible to correlate WILC with Piccard-Online.
The main criterion that was applied was the motifs being
identical, which disregarded terminological differences.
For this large group of hits, it was necessary to unify the
terminology. The following description shows a few samples
of such inconsistent terminology.
108
Piccard-Online WILC
four-leaved four-petalled
cloverleaf trifoliate trefoil
conch shell
straight orientated horizontal
star with eight rays eight-pointed
In many cases a common terminology could be found; it
was more difficult when there were fundamental differences
between the databases. The various names used for
heraldry is one example. In Piccard-Online, the expression
“coat of arms” is used, whereas the WILC uses the term
“shield”. Since a change would have affected several thousand
entries, a compromise was reached in which a unified
terminology (“coat of arms”) is only used at the first level.
Steps in unifying the watermark terminology has already
left its mark in scholarly research, as can be seen in an article
by Carmen Kämmer on “city coats of arms” in Piccard-
Online.
How complex such terminological problems can be has
been shown by Nigel Palmer, who uses the example of the
motif names “Vierfüßer” and “Vielfüßer”. And indeed,
Palmer’s observations were not unique, as work on the Thesaurus
has shown. Piccard categorizes a long list of animals
under the motif “Vierfüßer”, including not only deer, bear,
lion, donkey, horse, but also monkey and rabbit, as well as
the Christian symbol of the Easter lamb. Additional confusion
is caused by the fact that the printed version of Piccard
(Findbuch Vol. 15) speaks of “Vierfüsslern”, whereas Piccard-Online
uses the homonym “Vierfüßer”. In the English
version of Piccard-Online, this has been translated as “tetrapod”,
a word that is not found, however, in standard dictionaries.
In English, the prefix “tetra” (four) is used only in
chemical or mathematical compounds. In the Thesaurus,
the term “quadruped” has been used. As a consequence,
the term in Piccard-Online has had to be changed.
Still trickier is “Vielfüßer”, which in Piccard-Online has
been defined as a new motif. The main watermark motifs
in this group are crabs, scorpions, and spiders, that is, creatures
with several legs. When looking for an English translation
for this classification term, in standard dictionaries one
finds “multiped”, “multipede” and “polypod”. If one does
not want to fall back on an expression like “animal with
more than four legs”, a more intensive search for a suitable
word is needed, since only older editions of the Langenscheidt
dictionary clearly refer to “polypod” as a zoological
term. “Multiped” was chosen for the English version of Piccard-Online,
the latest version of the Thesaurus now offers
“polypod”; also here a new up-date in Piccard-Online
should be taken into consideration.
These examples also show that the Thesaurus is not a finished
dictionary, but rather can only be seen as a “work in
progress” that is constantly undergoing improvements and
checks. Continual editorial supervision will therefore be
needed.
The relevance of editorial supervision is also apparent if
looking at the newly developed component model within
the Bernstein-Portal. The various project collaborators have
already put the planned research module through an intensive
test phase, using selected watermarks of the bull’s
head motif. In the process, a series of terminological problems
appeared that still need to be resolved. Both coordination
in terminological discrepancies and the incorporation
of new terms into the Thesaurus need to be undertaken in
this regard. The sample in the following table gives an impression
of this sort of problem.