Images

1. Title page of Emmanuel Alvarez's Grammar

2. Pp. 34-35 of Alvarez's Grammar

Images 1 through 6 are from Emmanuel Alvarez's De institutione grammatica tres libri. Alvarez was a Portuguese Jesuit, born in Madeira in 1526 and died in Evora in 1582. He produced one of the most widely used Latin grammars of the 16th and 17th centuries. His original grammar, published in 1572, and later revisions, interfaced with a number of languages, went through dozens of printings as late as 1879.(Continued below)

3. Pp. 36-37 of Alvarez's Grammar

4. P. 66 of Alvarez's Grammar

This edition, which was published in three parts in 1688 and 1689 in Trnava (Nagyszombat), Slovakia, features parallel Hungarian and Slovak forms of Latin verbs, making it the earliest trilingual grammar of these languages. The copy from which these images are taken is in the Subotica (Serbia) City Library, and as far as is known, it is the only one extant in the world.

5. P. 125 of Alvarez's Grammar

6. Unnumbered page of Alvarez's Grammar

Alvarez's work clearly influenced Pál Pereszlényi (1630-1689), who prepared Grammatica linguae ungaricae on the basis of Alvarez's and Albert Szenci Molnar's (1574-1634) grammars. See also Zsuzsa, Vladár C., "Pereszlényi Pál nyelvtanának terminusairól," Magyar Nyelv, (97,2004), 467-479. Return to Table of Contents

6a. Title Page of Book I of the 1709 Buda Edition of Alvarez's Grammar

6b. Title page of Book III of Alvarez's Grammar

Newly surfaced in the Subotica City Library are Books I and III of Alvarez's Grammar. The Austrian National Library owns a copy of Book I, but so far we are not aware of anyone else who has a copy of Book III. The significance of these books, printed by the University in Buda, although most of its operations had already moved to Pest, is that they point to continuing influence of the Jesuits in the university, a quarter century after their suppression. Return to Table of Contents