János Sajnovics de Tordas et Káloz

Káloz

Káloz is a village in Fejér county, Hungary.In 1559 it was property of Mihály Cseszneky and Balázs Baranyai.-Sources:* Szíj Rezső: Várpalota* Fejér megyei történeti évkönyv* Hofkammerarchiv Wien* - External links :*...

(1733, Tordas

Tordas

- External links :* *...

 – 1785, Pest) was a Hungarian

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and Jesuit

Society of Jesus

The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...

. He is best known for his pioneering work in comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....

, particularly his systematic demonstratation of the relationship between Sami

Sami languages

Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...

 and Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

.

Sajnovics was a pupil of the astronomer and mathematician Maximilian Hell

Maximilian Hell

Maximilian Hell, S.J. was a Hungarian astronomer and an ordained Jesuit priest from the Kingdom of Hungary.- Biography :...

. When Hell planned an expedition to observe the transit of Venus

Transit of Venus

A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun...

 in Vardø

Vardø

is a town and a municipality in Finnmark county in the extreme northeast part of Norway.Vardø was established as a municipality on 1 January 1838 . The law required that all cities should be separated from their rural districts, but because of a low population and very few voters, this was...

, northern Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 in June, 1769, he took Sajnovics with him. Hell had heard that the Hungarian and Lapp (Sami) languages were related and thought that Sajnovics, as a native Hungarian speaker, would be able to investigate the connection.

Sajnovics published the results of his research in his Demonstratio idioma Hungarorum et Lapporum idem esse (1770), which was a breakthrough in the study of Uralic languages

Uralic languages

The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

. Sajnovics's ideas were further developed by Samuel Gyarmathi

Samuel Gyarmathi

Sámuel Gyarmathi was a Hungarian linguist, born in Cluj . He is best known for his systematic demonstration of the comparative history of the Finno-Ugric languages in the book Affinitas linguae hungaricae cum linguis fennicae originis grammatice demonstrata which built on the earlier work of...

.

Sources

• Denis Sinor
  Denis Sinor
  Denis Sinor was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Central Asian Studies at the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University and a tenured lecturer at Cambridge University between 1948 and 1962, and was one of the world's leading scholars for the history of Central Asia. Sinor...
  
  The Uralic languages: description, history and foreign influences (Brill, 1988)