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Showing posts with label diagnostic contrast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diagnostic contrast. Show all posts

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Hungarian Contributions and Arabic Contributions to international scholarship in Classics: A Diagnostic Contrast


I'm not trying here to give a detailed diagnostic contrast between the Hungarian contributions to the international scholarship in the field of classics. My aim is to give a link to an interesting article that I've recently found online, about the Hungarian contributions in this field. The article is Rttook, Zsigmund. (1997) "The contribution of Hungary to international classical scholarship" Hungarian Studies, 12. Archived here.

The Hungarian case is very informative in many ways; first its language, like the Arabic, is not a modern science language. Nevertheless the Hungarian contributions has been recognizing internationally, cf. e.g. and I quote p. 12 of this article "At the centre of Gyula Moravcsik's interests stood the relationship of Byzantium and the Turcic peoples. (Turcic in the broadest sense of the word, more or less as Byzantine historians used the word, so even Hungarians were included.) His  monumental Byzantino-turcica remains an indispensable instrument for all who  deal with Byzantine history and with Turcic languages because the first volume of the work gives a detailed survey with a full bibliography of all Byzantine histo­rians who mention some Turcic people. The second volume contains all refer­ences to Turcic peoples and records of their languages on the basis not only of  printed texts, but also on the examination of the manuscript tradition. It was he,  further, who produced the standard edition of Constantine Porphyrogennetus' work De administrando imperio."

This monumental work appeared first in Hungarian Budapest 1942 & 1943 then in Berlin 1958 as a second edition in German. This in my opinion is a true case in which the genuine work recieves recognition even if it was composed in a language not considered as a science language.