Grammatica, Quatuor Linguarum Hebraicae, Chaldaicae, Syriacae et Arabicae, Harmonica [Harmonic Grammar of Four Languages, (specifically) Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian Aramaic, and Arabic]. By Johann Heinrich Hottinger. Heidelberg: Adriani Wyngaerden, 1659.
A textbook by the Orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger, presenting the rules of grammar of four of the most important languages of the Near East.
Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1620-1667) was one of the foremost Hebraic and Oriental studies scholars of the 17th-century "Age of Reason." In the process of getting his books printed, Hottinger found it necessary to hunt down print types for the letters of Oriental alphabets, which were highly uncommon in northern Europe in those days. He employed a number of different strategies; among other things, he attempted to buy types from the printer Wilhelm Schickard and from the Orientalist Theodor Hackspan, and successfully purchased the types used in preparing the Paris Polyglot Bible. In the end, he managed to convince two printers in the town of Heidelberg, Samuel Brown and Adrian Weyngard, to equip their printing houses with Aramaic and Arabic types. Thus, several of his works were printed and published in Heidelberg.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Latin term "Harmonica" (i.e., harmonic), which appears in the book title, was used to describe comparative dictionaries and grammar textbooks that presented a number of different, related languages "under one roof." Specifically, they would focus on particular words that had similar forms or identical roots in all the languages in question (thus creating "harmony," so to speak). Such books were highly regarded in the philological study of Oriental languages, insofar as knowledge of the forms of the letters of the alphabets of these languages and their rules of grammar was restricted to only a few chosen individuals in Europe in those days.
[6], 211, [1] pp., approx. 19 cm. Good condition. Minor stains and blemishes. Closed and open tears to edges of several leaves (some restored; not affecting text). Trimmed margins, affecting text in some leaves. First gathering detached. No binding.
Not in NLI.