É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
Appendix by István Ormos
ISTVÁN ORMOS APPENDIX Remarks on Editorial Attitudes in the Goldziher-Nöldeke Correspondence collected by István Ormos Introductory remarks The aim of the critical edition of texts is to determine its earliest possible form, to come as close as possible to the text which the author composed and wrote down, if the autograph does not survive. We have very few autographs of mediaeval Arabictexts at our disposal, therefore we have to rely upon one or more manuscripts which were copied by scribes of widely differing levels of accuracy and natural gifts. The elimination of scribal errors is relatively easy in classical Arabic texts where violations of the rules of classical grammar are easily identified and corrected. Namely, it is generally assumed that the author wrote in pure classical Arabic and the mistakes come from ignorant copyists. With Middle Arabic texts, however, the situation is much more complicated. In MA various standards coexist, beginning with classical forms and ending with the wildest late dialectal phenomena. Any of these may originate both from the author and from any of the subsequent copyists. The question is of course how we can determine the forms the author may have used. The situation is even more complicated when we have several manuscripts with different forms at our disposal. Owing to the prestige of classical Arabic, orthodox editors tend to replace later forms with classical ones, a method justly subjected to criticism. And of course this is relatively easy in the field of morphology, while a reshaping of the syntax would involve a much deeper intervention in the fabric of a given text. It is very interesting to see how these two giants of early Islamwissenschaft and Arabic studies discussed these problems. The following excerpts were collected from the transcripts of the Goldziher-Nöldeke correspondence preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. As they have not been published before, I think it is worth making them known to the academic community because the problems treated in them have not ceased to occupy the editors of Middle Arabic sources to the present day. 23 8 3 8 Similar problems are well known in the edition of "vulgar" texts in other languages too. See e.g. Otto Stählin, Editionstechnik. 2nd ed., Leipzig-Berlin 1914, 13; Dmitriy Sergeevic Lihacev, Tekstologiya, 2nd rev. ed., Leningrad 1983, 506-521; Radovan Lalic, 'Ob orfografii kriticeskih izdaniy', in: Tekstologiya slavyanskih literatur. Dokladl konferencii Leningrad, 25-30 mava 1971 goda. Leningrad 1973, 50-59; Pandele Olteanu, 'Problem'i transkripcii i izdaniya slavyano-rumi'nskih tekstov', ibid., 162-174. Cf- al s o> e.g., David ben Abraham al-FäsT, The Hebrew-Arabic Dictionary of the Bible known as Kitäb Jämi' al-A/fäz (Agrön). Ed. Solomon L. Skoss, (Yale Oriental Series, Researches, 138
