Sylvester, Ioannes: Grammatica Hungarolatina - Bibliotecha Scriptorum Medii 15. (Budapest, 2006)

GRAMMATICA HUNGAROLATINA (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Medii Recentisque Aevorum. Series Nova Tomus XV) János Sylvester (around 1504 before 1552) was an outstanding figure of Hungarian humanism. He translated the entire New Testament into Hungarian (1541) using Erasmus’s Greek-Latin version as his model. For that great undertaking, the work presented in this volume, Gram­matica Hungarölatina (1539), served as a preliminary study. The work neatly fits into the process of Europe’s growing appreciation for the value of “unrefined” (native) languages. Following the examples of other nations, Sylvester prepared a work explaining the grammar rules of his mother tongue par­allel to those of Latin. Simultaneously, he clarified the characteristic differences between Hungarian and Latin grammars. The present edition is the first critical edition of Grammatica Hungarölatina. The text was published twice in the 19th century (1808, 1866). The latter was reissued twice in the 20th century. The present edition differs markedly from the previous publications. Errors in the original text have been corrected and an apparatus criticus has been added. The paradigms are no longer given as a con­tinuous text, but have been organized into chart form, giving the work more clarity. The fact summary contains mostly less known names of persons and ge­ographical locations. It also refers to the circumstances of the origin of Gramma­tica' Hungarölatina and other areas of Sylvester’s work. AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ ARGUMENTUM KIADÓ BUDAPEST JOANNES SYLVESTER ISBN 963 446 392 4

Next