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OCR
THE HEBREW LANGUAGE AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS... and because of its direction of writing from right to left as with other oriental languages,** — although as he remarked, during the centuries since the building of the tower of Babylon (Babel) these characteristics changed, and in his days Hungarian was already written by Latin characters and from left to right. But he did not compare the two languages in detail. There is simply one reference to the common use of affixes concerning pronomen affixum.* He also referred to certain Hebrew loanwords in Hungarian such as “Szombat” (Shabbat). °° By the middle of the seventeenth century the relation between the Hebrew and Hungarian languages were taken for granted, and the pronomen affixum was one of the most common characteristics for this comparison. György Komäromi Csipkes (1628-1678) was an avid representative ofthis concept after studying theology and Hebrew first in Särospatak and later in Utrecht. He became professor of Eastern languages and philosophy at the Illustrious School of Debrecen, a chartered royal city in the Great Hungarian Plane. In several of his works he discussed the contact between Hebrew and Hungarian. His first work is a speech he gave in 1651 in Utrecht under the title: Oratio hebraea continens elogium linguae hebraeae. In this speech Komäromi exalted Hebrew as the most holy of languages. He made a comparative linguistic analysis in Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hungarian. Concerning Hungarian he tried to point the correspondence in content between some Hebrew and Hungarian words, but finally homonymy seems to be the method he used.?” In his inaugural speech held in Debrecen on 8" August 1653, when Komäromi Csipkés started his career as a professor,** he repeats some considerations on the Hebrew language he mentioned in his previous oratio in Utrecht,’ but 34“, jobbtdl, mint egyéb Nap-keleti nyelvek, balra irattatik...” 35 “Az affixumok is a Magyar székban, mint szintén a’ Sidoban szepen meg-vagynak.” GELEJI KATONA, Magyar Grammatikatska, C2. 36 GELEJI KATONA, Magyar Grammatikatska, C4. 37° KOMÄROMICSIPKES, Oratio hebraea, continens Elogium linguae hebraeae ...., Utrecht, J. Waesberg, 1651, 11. VENETIANER, Lajos, A heber-magyar összehasonlitö nyelveszet, IMIT Evkönyv 4 (1898), 136-164. See especially 162-164. referring to this practice of Hungarian Christian scholars, but he failed to mention Komáromi Csipkés among them. Cf. LANZERITSCH, Maria, Komaromi Csipkés György: Oratio Hebraea, in G. Lancsák — E. Hargittay (ed.), Írók és művek a XVII-XVIII. században. Budapest, ELTE BTK, 1984, 22-24. 38 Oratio ingaruralis. De linguae hebraeae utilitate, dignitate, necessitate i.e. On usefulness, dignity and necessity of the Hebrew language. 39 There is a general misunderstanding among Hungarian historians, who assume that this Oratio inaguralis is merely the Latin version of Komáromi Csipkés" previous Oratio hebraea. Some general considerations are repeated, but they are two totally different texts. Cf. e.g. the remarks of MÁRKuSs Mihály, Komáromi Csipkés György: Egyháztörténeti értekezés. Budapest, Református Sajtóosztály, 1990, who guoted the text of this Oratio inaguralis as that of the + 69 +
