Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)

BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók

INTRODUCTION

33

j (e.g. iam, maiestas etc.) we should always write j. However Bél never, in any case, writes in the Latin text the letter j, so being evidently conform with the European standard of the time,33 and subsequently it would be unfortunate if we changed arbitrarily this consequent ortography.

We kept the peculiar punctuation of Bél that uses comma rather often. Our first and main reason is this punctuation’s peculiarity and character: it is surely originated from Bél since he consequently uses it in the manuscripts by his own hand,34 and he apparently instructed his copyists to follow this practice, as it appears in all the manuscripts and in the printed texts as well.35 36 37 Secondly Bed’s pursuit is logical since he always separates with comma the syntactic parts within the sentence (down to the attributive or participial constructions), hence - eventually - making the understanding easier.

Besides there are two more orthographical peculiarities in the texts by Bél. The first is that in case ol some prefixes - especially with the prefixe ad- contrarily to the common use, he does not mark the assimilation of the d (e.g. he writes adfero, adpello instead of affero, appello).36 It’s even more unusual that he is consequent on writing separately some compound conjunctions and pronouns contracted in common use (in primis, quid quid, quo circa instead of imprimis, quidquid, quocirca etc.).31 Although these practices are not standard, we decide to keep them because they represent very well Bél’s purist and meticulous approach to grammar and also - allow us to remark — his didactic Latin style.

We revised and corrected the text, when it was needed. We corrected the errors of copyists and scribes: the mis-spellings, repeated words, omissions. Our corrections are based on previous manuscripts when we had them at disposal (and if the error did not originate in them or earlier). We always indicated those corrections, meaning we put the incorrect form in text critical note (e.g. „corr. ex obertas"). The text critical notes run below Bél’s text (and Bél’s own notes) with Arabic numbers restarting in each pages, consecutively, without linebreak.

When Bél quoted from a printed work or manuscript, we always compared the citation with the original text. In the case of printed works we took great care to use the same edition as Bél did. As for the manuscripts, Bél usually quotes from letters; if we couldn’t find the original letter or the copy he used, we used the best and most modern edition to compare with the quotation cited in Bél’s text. According to our experience this meticulous comparison was necessary. In these quoted texts there are a lot of errors, omissions, mis-writings compared to their original source. The main reason for that could possibly be that Bél often confided it to his scribes to do the tedious work of copying a long piece of text.38

We did not correct in the quoted text however the difference from the original when it was apparently the intentional modification of Bél. The major part of these modifications are orthographi33 Fazekas 2000. 78.

34 To take an example let’s see the draft of Bars County’s description in his handwriting: „Barchiensem Comitatum, olim, a civitate Barch, ita adpellavere, nostri illi homines, qui regionem, in Comitatus primi dispertiverunt.” Bél Mátyás: Historia Comitatus Barchiensis. LK 427. kt. 241.

35 The sentence in the previous note shows the same in print, furthermore there is an extra comma after Comitatus. See Bél 1735-1749? IV. 157.

36 For this phenomenon see the form adpellavere in the quoted sentence above (see note 34.).

37 See in primis in Arva county’s description, in our edition pp. 59, 60, 61. etc. For quid quid cf. ibidem p. 61. For quo circa see Bél 1735-1749? III. 361.

38 This is how he proceeded for example in the first version of the deserption of Visegrád (as part of the description ol Pest-Pilis-Solt county), where he instructed the scribe to copy certain parts of Miklós Oláh’s Hungária. See [ßeli- us, Matthias:] De Buda Libera Regiaque Urbe et Metropoli Hungáriáé (title at the beginning not corresponding to the whole content) LK Fragm. IX. pp. 29-30.