Page - 231 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

231The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum added by Hell, based on his Lapland experiences, but one may assume that this part of the Expeditio litteraria would have relied mostly on Leem’s work. Sajnovics, who was the author of the “diary of the entire journey,” had spent the last couple of years as an assistant of Weiss at the Trnava observatory by the time Hell received an invitation from Copenhagen, so he may not have been the likeliest candidate for the role of Hell’s companion on the journey. In the unfinished draft introduction to the Expeditio litteraria, Hell states the obvious, namely that Sajnovics was chosen because of his likable personality, his good health, and his astronomical skills. An alternative or supplementary explana- tion also lends itself: on his own testimony, Sajnovics was “born and raised in Hungary by Hungarian parents.”67 As one of the principal sub-projects associ- ated with the Vardø expedition (to be elaborated in part 3 of volume 1) was the investigation of the linguistic kinship between Sámi and Hungarian, having a member of the crew with Hungarian as his mother tongue was certainly of some significance. It is, however, hard to corroborate the claim that Hell judged Sajnovics’s linguistic skills to be of importance already in 1767. There is coun- ter-evidence to suggest that the idea of such an investigation may have been formed at a later stage, almost by hazard. Before we investigate this possibility, a brief sketch of the “pre-history” of Finno-Ugrian comparative linguistics seems warranted. Although neither the notion of “language families” nor the term “Finno- Ugrian” (or Finno-Ugric) existed before the nineteenth century, by itself, the positing of the kinship of Hungarian and Sámi was nothing new at the time of the expedition.68 One of the earliest academic texts arguing for a linguistic link between several of the languages now considered Finno-Ugrian was writ- ten by  Martin Fogel(ius) (1634–75) of Hamburg, De Finnicae linguae indole Lapponicæ, de Lapponibus Finmarchiæ, Eorumqve lingva, vita et religione pristina com­ mentatio, multis tabulis æneis illustrata: Una cum J.E. Gunneri […] Notis; & E.J. Jessen­ S. […] Tractatu singulari de Finnorum Lapponumqve Norvegic. religione pagana) (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger International Boghandel, 1975). Cf. the chapter headings with Hell’s call for subscriptions. 67 János Sajnovics, Demonstratio: Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse (Copenhagen: Salicath, 1770) and (Trnava: Collegium Academicum Societatis Jesu, 1771), [x]. For modern editions, see the facsimile, ed. Thomas A. Sebeők (The Hague: Mouton, 1968); German translation by Monika Ehlers, Beweis, das die Sprache der Ungarn und Lappen dieselbe ist, ed. Gyula Decsy and Wolfgang Veenker (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1972); Hungarian translation by Zsuzsa C. Vladár, Demonstratio: Bizonyítás; A magyar és a lapp nyelv azonos, ed. Enikő Szíj (Budapest: elte, 1994). 68 For a standard narrative of the early modern roots of Finno-Ugrian linguistics, see Günter Johannes Stipa, Finnisch­ ugrische Sprachforschung: Von der Renaissance bis zum Neuposi­ tivismus (Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura, 1990).