Slovo o Polku Igorove Online?

[Keenan, Edward]

I can only agree with Mr. Partridge's characterization of JD.  The "oriental
languages" that he really knew were primarily the biblical ones: Hebrew,
Syriac, some Arabic.  There are notes in/on all of them in his voluminous
notebooks in the Národny' Museum in Prague.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Partridge [SMTP:james.partridge at ST-EDMUND-HALL.OXFORD.AC.UK]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 3:31 PM
> To:   SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject:      Re: Slovo o Polku Igorove Online?
> 
> 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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