Lexicon Lapponicum Bipartitum.....ungarice scriptum: Hungarian aspects of North Saami dictionary writing

The birth of North Saami lexicography in 18th-century Norway is closely related to the work of the Norwegian priest, Knud Leem (1697--1774). He was the first to publish a Danish–North Saami dictionary (En lappisk Nomenclator, 1756) to help the language learning of missionaries setting off for Saami territories. Later on, the "father" of the North Saami language continued his lexicographical work with a larger endeavour: he started to write a trilingual (North Saami–Danish–Latin) dictionary. The printing of the first volume of the 1600-page-long Lexicon Lapponicum started in 1768, but a year later, the work was suspended for a long period of time, because of unexpected "Hungarian happenings". It is a well-known fact among Finno-Ugric scholars that during their 1768--1769 astronomical expedition to the Norwegian Island of Vardø, Maximilian Hell (1720--1792) and János Sajnovics (1733--1778) also studied the Saami language that was already considered by contemporary international linguists as potentially related to Hungarian. Sajnovics thought that the Hungarian way of spelling would have been more suitable for the recording of the Saami language and for the demonstration of linguistic affinity, as "the Hungarian and the Lapp languages must be identical just on the basis of pronunciation alone". He put his theory into practice and with the help of the Saami-origin Anders Porsanger (1735--1780), he revised Leem's lexicon. During their work, in addition to applying Hungarian spelling, they also complemented the entries with Hungarian data. The current paper presents the history of the Saami dictionary written in "Hungarian".