Aloys | The Mantiqi

Austrian-born orientalist who made the first printed translation of the Shamsiyya (English, Calcutta 1854) and supervised the first edition of al-Tahānawī’s Kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn (Calcutta 1862).

Life

Sprenger was born on 3 September 1813 at Nassereith in the Tyrol. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he studied philosophy at Vienna, attending courses in medicine, natural science and oriental languages and working with Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, continued his studies in Paris and moved to London in 1836, becoming a British subject two years later. He took a doctorate in medicine at Leiden in 1841.

In 1843 he went to Calcutta as a physician. His command of oriental languages brought him in 1848 the post of principal of the Calcutta Madrasa and then of a college in Delhi; he catalogued the Persian and Arabic manuscripts of the libraries of the King of Oudh in Lucknow (Calcutta 1854) and edited a series of Arabic and Persian texts. In 1857 he returned to Europe as professor of oriental languages at Bern, settled in Heidelberg in 1881 and died there on 19 December 1893. His large collection of manuscripts was bought by the Royal Library in Berlin.

His work on logic belongs to his Calcutta years. In 1854 the Asiatic Society of Bengal published, in its Bibliotheca Indica, the ‘First appendix to the Dictionary of the technical terms used in the sciences of the Mussalmans, containing the Logic of the Arabians, in the original Arabic, with an English translation’: al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya with Sprenger’s translation, ii + 36 + 29 pages. In 1857 he published a correction to the translation in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. The ‘Dictionary’ of the title was al-Tahānawī’s Kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn, which appeared in two volumes in 1862 under the supervision of Sprenger and W. Nassau Lees, with the corrections of three Indian scholars, Mawlawī Muḥammad Wajīh, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq and Ghulām Qādir; at the end of the second volume stand the text of the Shamsiyya, Sprenger’s translation and an index of its terms. The TDV calls this edition the best printing of the Kashshāf, the basis of most later reprints.

Uncertain or disputed

Whether the 1854 issue contains the Arabic text: the TDV article on the Shamsiyya says that only the Arabic title is given and the Arabic text is missing, and that text and translation appear at the end of the 1862 Kashshāf; the Penn Libraries record of the British Library copy (‘Text in Arabic and English’) and the printed title (‘in the original Arabic, with an English translation’) indicate that the Arabic text is included.
Outside logic he is best known for his work on the life of Muḥammad and his views on the hadith tradition, which this page does not discuss.

Works

The Logic of the Arabians (al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya), in the original Arabic, with an English translation — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaCalcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal (Bibliotheca Indica), Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1854; ii + 36 + 29 pp. The first printed translation of the Shamsiyya into a European language.تَرْجَمَة
Berichtigung [zur Übersetzung der Risâla Śamsijja über Logik] — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaCorrection to his translation, ZDMG 11 (1857), 737.عَمَل
A Dictionary of the Technical Terms Used in the Sciences of the Musalmans (Kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn) — عَلَى al-TahānawīFirst edition of al-Tahānawī’s encyclopaedia, 2 vols., Calcutta 1278/1862, with W. Nassau Lees, Muḥammad Wajīh, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq and Ghulām Qādir; the Shamsiyya with Sprenger’s translation is appended to vol. II.طَبْعَة
A Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindústány Manuscripts of the Libraries of the King of OudhCalcutta 1854.عَمَل

Reception

Modern logicians first met the Shamsiyya through Sprenger. The TDV notes that Nicholas Rescher based his Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic on two sources, Sprenger’s translation and Goichon’s French translation of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Ishārāt.

Sources (5)