A GRAMMAR WITHIN A GRAMMAR
BUXTORF, Johannes.
Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, breviter & methodice ad publicum Scholarum usum proposita. Adjecta succincta de mutatione punctorum vocalium Instructio, & Textum Psalmorumque aliquot Hebraicorum Latina Interpretatio …
London, Roger Daniel, 1653.
8vo, pp. [xii], 2–4, 6–119, [5]; printed right to left; a few pages lightly dust-soiled at head, occasional light marks, some marginal creasing, front flyleaf largely excised; but a very good copy in contemporary English blind-ruled sheep sewn on 3 thongs laced in, sixteenth-century printed waste reused as endpapers (see below); joints and hinges cracked but thongs holding firm, small loss to foot of spine, edges dusty; cancelled sixteenth-century inscription to rear free endpaper with ?seventeenth-century note ‘Quicquid enim arcanis’, eighteenth-century juvenile manuscript transliterations from Psalm 18 to title verso.
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Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, breviter & methodice ad publicum Scholarum usum proposita. Adjecta succincta de mutatione punctorum vocalium Instructio, & Textum Psalmorumque aliquot Hebraicorum Latina Interpretatio …
Second edition (first Cambridge, 1646) of Buxtorf’s Hebrew grammar to be printed in England, here preserving a fragment of a sixteenth-century English-French grammar as endpapers and with a student’s manuscript Hebrew transliterations.
Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) was professor of Hebrew at Basel and ‘the principal founder of rabbinical study among Christian scholars … The best grammatical work of Buxtorf was the “Praceptiones Grammaticae de Lingua Hebraea” (Basel, 1605), later published under the title “Epitome Grammaticae Hebraeae” and afterward successively edited about sixteen times by Buxtorf’s son and others, and translated into English by John Davis (London, 1656)’ (Jewish Encyclopedia). Our copy bears charming – if somewhat clumsy – manuscript Hebrew transliterations in a juvenile eighteenth-century hand, comprising Psalms 18:33 (‘Hael hamazreni chajil vaijtter tamim darki’), Psalms 18:32 (‘Mi Elohah mikbalyade Jehova / umi tzur tzulati Elohenu’), and Psalms 18:42–3 (‘Jeshavenu ve en moshauh al Jehovah velo anam / Weiskakem kejaphar al pono ruach ketet cutzor arikom’).
The endpapers reuse a fragment of O1 from a copy of Palsgrave’s 1530 London-printed Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, ‘one of the first grammars of the French language’ (Folger Shakespeare Library Catalogue). The present fragment, taken from the grammar’s ‘Table of Verbes’, provides first-person example sentences in English as well as French translations and conjugations, e.g. ‘I Humble I meken or make meke / Ie me humilie …’, or the slightly raunchier ‘I Jape a wenche / Ie fous, nous foutons … foutre … as for bestocquer, it is but a fayned worde, for it betokeneth properly to stabbe or to foyne, also in more coverte langage they use je fays cela …’.
Buxtorf: ESTC R35461 (‘text continuous despite pagination’); Palsgrave: ESTC S104266.