Edward Spencer Dodgson an Hugo Schuchardt (071-02421)

von Edward Spencer Dodgson

an Hugo Schuchardt

Paris

16. 03. 1893

language Englisch

Schlagwörter: language Sanskritlanguage Walisisch Priebsch, Josef

Zitiervorschlag: Edward Spencer Dodgson an Hugo Schuchardt (071-02421). Paris, 16. 03. 1893. Hrsg. von Bernhard Hurch (2015). In: Bernhard Hurch (Hrsg.): Hugo Schuchardt Archiv. Online unter https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:hsa.letter.3272, abgerufen am 28. 03. 2024. Handle: hdl.handle.net/11471/518.10.1.3272.


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Dear Dr Schuchardt,

your letter received this morning pains and astounds me. If you seek a cessation of our friendship, I shall regret it for many reasons but, as Mr D’Abbadie says, “truth before all things”. You know he thinks with me that your dread of gleichklang is irrational. Nothing else as I have already said to you, enables Sir William Jones to sweep Sanskrit and its children into the same family as Avestan or Erse. If femina became substituted for uxor in Gaul, why should not Emazte have been specialised among the Esthonian Finns to mean, not as you say, stepmother, but, as I wrote, mother in law? You have several times complained to me of your health - As a Christian I have ventured to shew my sympathy by suggesting remedies. Priebsch told me you suffered much from sleeplessness. Having lately learnt from a Scotch oculist whom I met here the virtues of sulphonal, I thought it worth while to let you know that it had succeeded in my case as a soporific – now you use it to insult me by wishing me to sulphonalize my “hallucinations”! A man of science should be courteous and aimiable, and overthrow errors by scientific arguments and demonstrations and not by personal rudeness. I have to tell you that my Cornish quotation is not from the Bible, and was inserted because it seemed to me to serve as a warning like my quotation from Ulfilas against allowing the Basque to be similarly eclipsed. If George the thirds government had founded Keltic schools in Cornwall, Dolly Pentreath would not have been the last person to talk Cornish Welsh. I am sorry that you do not like the Bible, or that my quoting it, or thinking of the glory of the Author of all Science, seems to you to prove that I am of an empty piety. I have been a great sinner, but have always liked the Bible and the Christian Church since childhood. I shall not dedicate anything to you after this last letter of yours, and if you1 want my Concordance to half St. Johns Epistles you must send me 3 francs. I had meant to make you a present of it.

E. S. Dodgson

2I coud write yards of arguments upon your letters - 16 March 1893, Paris.


1 Dodgson setzt am linken Rand fort.

2 Randnotiz auf der rechten Seite.

Faksimiles: Universitätsbibliothek Graz Abteilung für Sondersammlungen, Creative commons CC BY-NC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (Sig. 02421)