Slovo o Polku Igorove Online?

[James Partridge]

There is an interesting comment on Dobrovský in the Lexikon ceske
literatury, vol. 1 (A-G), p. 564: Freely (and quickly) translated it reads
as follows:

"...he was angered by an ideology that set against the enlightened,
tolerant, humanitarian ideal of the all-round development of man, the
one-sided concept of a nation defined by its language, whose proponents
would even sacrifice objective truth for the sake of their own interests.
Dobrovský made a clear statement of his feelings about such tendencies in an
article called "A Literary Deception" (1824, in German), and in other
polemical articles he defended (against Jungmann's followers) his opinion
that the Zelenohorský manuscript was a fake, intended to create an image of
the distant Bohemian past in line with the wishes and impressions of
contemporary patriots..."

Dobrovský was subsequently branded a "traitor" by patriotic Czechs and his
works more or less ignored by them until the end of the C19, the honourable
exception being Palacký and later, of course, Masaryk and his circle. So as
you can see, he was just the sort of man to forge the Slovo.

Incidentally, he knew German, Czech, Latin, Hebrew and evidently many other
Slavonic languages to a greater or lesser degree. I can't find any reference
to Turkic, though, although he did unsuccessfully apply for the post of
Professor of Oriental Languages in Prague in 1783.

James

****************
James Partridge
St Edmund Hall
Oxford
****************


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dean Worth" <dworth at UCLA.EDU>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 7:12 PM
Subject: Re: Slovo o Polku Igorove Online?


Dear Colleague,
I suggest you should read Professor Keenan's materials. If I remember
correctly, he shows precisely that Dobrovsky knew Turkic, which --depending
on the quality of D's knowledge, which I can't judge-- would vitiate the
argument (by Roman Jakobson and others) that the IT must be original to the
late 12th c.
because no one in the 18th could have known those Turkic words. The Az i ja
booklet isns't a very weighty piece of evidence. Regards, Dean Worth

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