É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
HOPKINS, Simon: The Language Studies of Ignaz Goldziher
SIMON HOPKINS al-'awämm etc. (pp. 25-26), was incorporated into a later German article on Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist in ZDMG 36 (1882), 282-284 = GS II 125-126, and the Arab grammarians' theory on the relationship between form and meaning (p. 44) reappears in Goldziher's magisterial review of Berliner's Beiträge zur hebräischen Grammatik im Talmud und Midrasch (Berlin 1879) in ZDMG 34 (1880), 379: J^ LLj *LJI SjUj ^ "'iT All ü4_J j Secondly, after the publication of On the History of Grammar among the Arabs Goldziher's scholarly tastes, as we have seen, moved away from matters philological and tended more and more towards the study of Islam. It very much looks as if Goldziher, who in any case was temperamentally never in a hurry to rush into print, 22 1 after 1878 had neither the wish nor the time to develop his A nyelvtudomány történetéről az araboknál into a full-fledged German monograph. The decision to leave the work in Hungarian was doubtless made easier by the appearance shortly afterwards of H. Derenbourg's edition of Sibawayhi's Kitäb (Paris 1881-1889). A work so fundamental to Arabic philology could hardly be left out of consideration, and to take it properly into account would have involved Goldziher in much laborious research in a field from which he was now moving away. Goldziher, as we have repeatedly observed, was primarily a historian of culture and ideas. He was interested in literary rather than linguistic history, and hence On the History of Grammar among the Arabs is concerned, as the subtitle An Essay in Literary History explicitly states, more with the development of linguistic literature in Arabic than with the development of Arabic linguistic forms - an additional chapter on 'Az arab szótárirodalom fejlődése' [The development of Arabic lexicography] was planned, but never printed and no such work has been found in the Goldziher Nachlass. He does, however, address the linguistic material itself, especially in chapter 2, which deals with "Az arab nyelvészek állása a dialektusokhoz és a népnyelvhez" [The attitude of the Arab philologists to the dialects and to the vernacular]. Since Goldziher was incapable of writing anything trivial, this chapter well repays a closer look. Goldziher's view of things was essentially of a dynamic character, the focus of his interest being placed firmly on the flow of ideas across time and space. He was not content with observation of a static, synchronic state of affairs alone, but was always eager to discover whence things had developed into what they had, whither they subsequently led and to what they are related. This diachronic and comparative approach applies to his linguistic preferences too. It was only natural that he should take an interest in the historical evolution of Arabic and its dialects and in their typological relation to other Semitic languages. A rare glimpse into Goldziher's views on such matters is found in the chapter under discussion, in which he 22 1 This well known characteristic is expressed by Goldziher himself: "aber ich habe die Art, das Fertige immer lange liegen zu lassen, oft sehr lange" (Hanisch, Briefwechsel 306). Cf. also ibid. 310, 318. 130
