- 67th Meeting, 2025: Lost and Found — The First Scholarly Grammar of the Kalmyk Language
Lost and Found — The First Scholarly Grammar of the Kalmyk Language
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Only few Mongolists will realize that there were two new grammars of the Kalmyk language in 1847, one by Aleksandr Popov (1808–1865) who had studied with Józef Kowalewski (1801–1878) who became the first holder of a chair of Mongolian Studies in Europe (1838), the other by a young German linguist, Bernhard Jülg (1825–1886) who submitted a doctoral thesis on Kalmyk grammar at the university of Kiel. The young doctor sent his dissertation to the President of the Academy, Sergej Uvarov (1786–1855) in St. Petersburg, for review. Russia seemed the most suitable place for a young researcher in this field: There was a sizable Mongolian population in Russia, and both the Academy in Petersburg and the University of Kazan boasted the position of a Mongolist. Both grammars were passed to Isaak Jakob Schmidt (1779–1847), the founder of Mongolian Studies, for his evaluation: Popov’s book was a good practical grammar, a textbook, while Jülg’s was a linguistic, scholarly work. Schmidt wrote an enthusiastic review¹ and planned on having Jülg being invited to Russia, possibly as his successor. He had hardly written his text when fate struck and he passed away. Therefore his review was not published and his plans could not be furthered. Worse luck, there did not seem to be a copy of the original dissertation extant — the St. Petersburg Academy does not have one, Kiel University was completely destroyed during WWII, Walther Heissig in his union catalogue of Mongol books did not mention it, and there did not seem to be a copy among Jülg’s papers at the Berlin State Library. Jülg’s great grandson mentioned in a footnote in a book on the Tyrolian family home that the University of Innsbruck possessed a copy (a photographic print) of the manuscript – but the Institute of Linguistics there did not know about it. This poor result directed research again to the Berlin Library. It turned out that the papers had been divided into an Oriental part and a “Western” part, and the latter provided hints to no less than three manuscripts that were of interest but none of them matched Jülg’s title “Initia linguae calmuccicae”. As a matter of fact, all three mss. had been transferred to the Oriental part later on and had been given “Ms. or.” call numbers.
The rediscovered manuscripts did not, however, provide a clean copy: There is a working copy in Latin, with many corrections, not easy to read, while the other two are abbreviated versions in German of part of the original dissertation. It is intended to edit the manuscripts and make the long lost work available to scholars.
[1] Eine unveröffentlichte Rezension des Akademikers Isaak Jakob Schmidt über zwei kalmükische Grammatiken (1847). ZDMG 170.2020, 153–162.