Sajnovics’s Demonstratio and Gyarmathi’s Affinitas : Terminology and methodology

János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi are usually appreciated as the first scholars to have proven the relatedness of the Finno-Ugric languages. This paper argues that the significance of Demonstratio and Affinitas lies not so much in their contribution to the idea of relatedness (since that had been in the air before them) as in the synthesis they give. Sajnovics and Gyarmathi arranged previously known but unsystematic information and arguments into a clear and coherent structure. They applied the principles of linguistic comparison very consciously and pointed out the importance of the evidence of grammar. The most important aspect of their work is the way it anticipated the methods of modern linguistics: deduction, logical inference, philological methods with Sajnovics, and reconstruction and the assumption of hypothetical transitional forms with Gyarmathi. In its purpose, Sajnovics’s book is closer to genealogical comparison, Gyarmathi’s to typological comparison

Sajnovics’s Demonstratio (1770) A linguistic treatise based on methods of natural sciences

Sajnovics János (1733–1785) was the author of the basic work of comparative linguistics (Demonstratio 1770), which is considered the first scientific demonstration of the affinity of Hungarian and a Finno-Ugric language, Saami. This work was created on the occasion of the 1769 astronomical expedition in Denmark as unplanned side research. After the expedition the leader, Maximilian Hell reported on the transition of Venus (Transitio Veneris) and his assistant, János Sajnovics on the Hungarian–Lappish linguistic identity (Demonstratio).[1] This paper will deal with the scientific research methodology of Demonstratio comparing it with the methodology applied in Hell’s astronomical treatise. We also consider some contemporary critics of the methodology of Demonstratio.   [1] In this paper I will use the term Lappish instead of politically correct Saami, according to the 18th-century terminology