Fine Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928) Paperback. Foolscap 8vo. (18 x 12 cm). Text in Ottoman script entirely, with bilingual title in French and Ottoman Turkish on the cover. 60 p. Ignác Kúnos was a Hungarian linguist, turkologist, folklorist, a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At his time he was one of the most recognized scholars of Turkish folk literature and Turkish dialectology. Grandfather of George Kunos (1942) American-Hungarian neuroendocrinologist, pharmacologist. He attended the Reformed College in Debrecen, then studied linguistics at the Budapest University between 1879 and 1882. With the financial support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Budapest Jewish community, he spent five years in Constantinople studying the Turkish language and culture. In 1890 he was appointed at the Budapest University as professor of Turkish philology. Between 1899-1919 he was the director of the newly organized Oriental College of Commerce in Budapest. From 1919 until 1922 he held the same post at the Oriental Institute integrated into the Budapest University of Economics, and then from 1922, he taught Turkish linguistic at the university. In the summer of 1925 and 1926, invited by the Turkish government, he was a professor at the Ankara and Istanbul Universities, besides this in 1925 he organized the Department of Folkloristics at the Istanbul University. He died during the Soviet siege of Budapest. At the beginning of his career, he mainly focused on the dialectology, phonological and morphological matters of the Hungarian language as well as the ones of the Mordvinic languages. Being a pupil of Ármin Vámbéry, his interest was directed towards the Turkish language and philology. From 1885 until 1890, during his stay in Constantinople, he traveled to Rumelia, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. During his trip, he observed and studied the characteristics of the Turkish dialects, ethnography, folk poetry, and folk customs of Turkish and other local peoples. The most significant merit of him was that he collected an impressing amount of folk tales and anecdotes that were published in Hungarian as well as many other European languages. As a recognition of his scientific results, he was elected a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but he also was a vice-president of the International Society for the Investigation of Central and Eastern Asia. (Wikipedia). This is one of the earliest compilations of Turkish lullabies. Scarce. Özege 6720. First and Only Edition.
