A seminar on medieval manuscripts was held at the University of Otago in Dunedin. The seminar concluded with a paper by Michal Kovář on the attribution of the early modern grammatical manuscript Rudimenta Linguae Finnicae breviter delineata.
The manuscript was discovered in a composite volume of printed Fennica acquired by the National Library of Finland from a private British collection. For Finland and for the history of the Finnish language, the discovery was an important one. The Finnish grammatical tradition does not begin until the seventeenth century, to which the newly discovered manuscript also belongs, and the surviving body of material is relatively limited. In addition to the usual codicological and related description, attempts were made to attribute the manuscript by comparing it with Finnish, Scandinavian, German, and Southern European grammatical traditions. One published hypothesis proposed that the manuscript originated in the milieu of the Moravian Jesuits around the turn of the seventeenth century, at the Collegium Nordicum in Olomouc. At that time, a couple of Finns are known to have studied there and to have been assigned the task of compiling a grammar of Finnish. Unfortunately, almost nothing from the Jesuit college in Olomouc has survived, owing to incursions by Finnish cavalry and other units of the Swedish army during the Thirty Years’ War.
It was nevertheless possible to compare the Rudimenta with the Latin grammars that served as models for Jesuit grammatical writing in Central Europe – in the Czech lands and Austria – above all the grammar of Álvares, as well as with contemporary grammars of Central European vernaculars, particularly Czech, that may be placed within the Jesuit tradition. The categories of comparison included, broadly speaking, metastructional and compositional features (the ordering of chapters dealing with individual levels of language; the use of authentic texts; versification as part of the chapter on prosody, etc.), terminology (terminological preferences; model words used in paradigms; hapax legomena, etc.), confessional features, and the comparative linguistic context (for example, whether similarities with Swedish are explicitly noted), among others. Dozens of individual phenomena were entered into a synoptic table indicating agreement with, or divergence from, possible models and analogues.
The results of the examination were surprising: no decisive tendencies emerged. At present, therefore, the manuscript cannot be attributed to any particular grammatical tradition.
The seminar concluded with a discussion, during which Kovář was asked how much time he had devoted in total to research that had produced no unequivocal result.
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