Reisz T. Csaba: Magyarország általános térképének elkészítése a 19. század első évtizedében - Lipszky János és segítői térképészeti vállalkozásának ismertetése (Budapest, 2002)
IDEGEN NYELVŰ ÖSSZEFOGLALÓK - The Making of Hungary’s First General Map in the first Decade of the 19th Century. The Cartographic Enterprise of János Lipszky
came possible, e.g. a 35-page long series of military maps on a 1:230 400 scale were certainly among his sources. Moreover, Lipszky also used pages from Demeter Görög’s county map series. From among the Hungarian aristocrats, Joseph palatine, count György Festetics and Ferenc Széchényi provided assistance in the undertaking. Direct assistance and contributions on a daily basis came from Lajos Schedius, professor of aesthetics at the Pest university, who actively took part in the work due to his enthusiasm for geography as well as Ferenc Zach who regularly reported about progress achieved in his journal. The Repertorium, the map ’s index Already from the start of the work Lipszky planned to compile an index in order to improve the map’s use which would contain all settlements found on the map in all possible names. This was significant as due to differing names used by various peoples of the country, certain settlements had as much as five names, which for reasons of space and clarity could not be all displayed on the map itself. Lajos Schedius compiled the Repertorium on a county basis, which were sent to the counties together with the sketch maps for corrections. Once these registers had been returned, the Repertorium that contains 24,000 items (about 38,000 items including references) was completed. Sources point out that the index was originally planned to contain a significandy higher number of items, with one column indicating the primary language of the item and other columns specifying the district in which the item was located. However, the published version is more successful in that it does not contain a separate column for languages; instead it specifies the appropriate language after the name of the given setdement. Lipszky paid careful attention to the spelling of the names of setdements. Hungarian, German and Latin names were probably checked by himself and Lajos Schedius. A Slovak religious dignity invited by Lipszky checked Slovakian names (regrettably, his name is unknown); the letter addressed to him describes the difficulties of compiling the Repertorium (see among the documents). As part of the linguistic checks, the essay of GHEORGHE §INKAI was published in 1804, which illustrates the possibilities of Latin phonetics of Romanian settlement names in Cyrillic letters. The engraving János Lipszky’s maps were made by two copper-engravers, the Polish-born GOTTFRIED PRIXNER and the Hungarian FERENC KARÁCS. The division of work meant that Prixner engraved the mountain and hydrogeology as well as decorative elements, then Karacs added the inscriptions. The pair would have also made 446
