Ernst Trumpp

Ernst Trumpp

Ernst Trumpp (born March 13, 1828 in Ilsfeld , † April 5, 1885 in Munich ) was a German linguist and is considered one of the most important orientalists of the 19th century. He learned 17 languages ​​and went on three extensive research and mission trips to the Orient. His works include the Persian translation of the Book of Common Prayer and the first English translation of the Adi Granth , a religious script of the Sikhs . As a young man around 1850 he was imprisoned for several months because of revolutionary activities.

Life

origin

Ernst Trumpp was born in Ilsfeld as the sixth child of the carpenter Georg Thomas Trumpp and his wife Sara (née Bader). Even as a child he was interested in foreign languages, attended school in Ilsfeld, secondary school in Lauffen am Neckar and the Karlsgymnasium in Heilbronn . As a scholarship holder, he studied at the Tübingen monastery and passed the theological service exam there. At the beginning of 1847 he became a member of the Roigel student association in Tübingen , which he left for political reasons in the same year. In addition to his theology studies, he acquired knowledge of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. Then he was village vicar in the lowlands .

Revolutionary activities

During the revolutionary unrest in 1849 he was in contact with the leading political and revolutionary figures in Heilbronn, gave political speeches at popular assemblies and founded a people's association. The deputy Ilsfeld farmer school Jeßer reported on his political activities to the Oberamt Besigheim on June 14, 1849: He was told "on private channels " that Trumpp "calls on people in the whole area and tries to induce bad views (...) He has also been to Kirchheim a / N and in several places where he takes too much out and drives people crazy. ” The Oberamt then obtained further information about Trumpp's activities in various places and also had various parish clerks and mayor interrogated who for the most part could not raise any concrete allegations, but also just wanted to hear something. Trumpp was nevertheless wanted in a wanted list for inciting an uprising and fled for 14 months to Switzerland to St. Gallen and Basel , where a missionary society gave him shelter. On August 31, 1850, however, he voluntarily returned home and faced the allegations against him in the Hohenasperg fortress . He was imprisoned there, and there were several interrogations and witnesses interrogations on his case in October 1850, none of which resulted in any concrete allegations. The investigation against Trumpp was only one of several hundred preliminary investigations against those involved in the uprisings of 1849. The case against him was dropped and he no longer appears in the list of 147 people against whom charges were actually brought in 1851.

After his release, he first completed the preceptor exam in Tübingen and then was a language teacher in Heilbronn, where he became a supporter of the traveling preacher Gustav Werner , who inspired him to publish his first publication The Creed of the Wandering Preacher GW , on the basis of which Trumpp from the Protestant teaching profession in September 1851 was excluded because the script attacked the leadership of the Protestant regional church.

Travel in the Orient

In 1852 he emigrated to England, where he was a Latin and Greek teacher at a private school, later a library assistant at the East Indian House in London , where he also learned Indian languages, before the Episcopal English Mission Society sent him to India as a translator in 1853 . The trip first took him to Bombay and Karachi . In 1854 he obtained his doctorate with a doctoral thesis written in Hebrew script.

In 1856 he fell ill with malaria and came to the mission inspector Jerusalem . In October 1856 he married the Swiss Pauline Linder in the Christ Church in Jerusalem. While still in Jerusalem he learned the Ethiopian language and translated the Ethiopian baptismal register into German before returning to Karachi in India. His wife died on September 24, 1857 after the birth of their son Paul in childbed, whereupon Trumpp went back to Basel with Paul and from there to Württemberg.

In 1858 he married Wilhelmine Luise Pelargus, the daughter of the art foundry Wilhelm Pelargus from Stuttgart. With her he undertook another extended trip to India, where he crossed the north of the country, including parts of today's Pakistan , as a researcher and missionary. Trumpp spoke the national language and had translated the English general prayer book into Persian. He learned a total of 17 languages, the results of his linguistic research include the first written records of the Kafir language .

In 1860 he left India for health reasons and returned to Germany. In Stuttgart he passed the second theological exam and worked on the results of his linguistic research. From 1863 to 1869 he was a deacon in Pfullingen .

After 1869 he made a third trip to Lahore in India, where he translated the Adi Granth , a religious script of the Sikhs , into English on behalf of the British government . This first translation of the work was published in London in 1877. As a further result of the trip, a book appeared in 1881 that had the religion of the Sikhs as its content.

Late work

After his return from India, he took up residence in Tübingen in 1871 , where he became a private lecturer in Semitic languages ​​and gave guest lectures at the University of Tübingen while preparing the printing of the Adi Granth . During this time he was also Max Eyth's Arabic teacher . After he was unable to obtain a professorship in Tübingen, he became professor for Semitic languages ​​and literature in Munich in 1874 . Here he published other writings on oriental languages. From 1873 he was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

As early as 1880 he was becoming increasingly blind and melancholy. He died at the age of 57 on Easter 1885 in Munich-Schwabing and was buried there.

Appreciation

Trumpp is considered to be the founder of New Indian philology . The orientalist Annemarie Schimmel wrote in 1961: If ever a man had a gift for learning foreign languages, it was Ernst Trumpp. On the 100th anniversary of his death, the University of Tübingen held a Trumpp symposium in 1985. Trumpp-Straße in Munich, Professor-Trumpp-Weg in Ilsfeld and Ernst-Trumpp-Weg in Pfullingen are named after him.

literature

• Hommel .:  Trumpp, Ernst . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 38, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, pp. 687-689.
• Otto Conrad : The linguist Ernst Trumpp von Ilsfeld - His part in the Heilbronn uprising in 1849 and his imprisonment on the Hohenasperg. In: Historischer Verein Heilbronn: Yearbook for Swabian-Franconian history. Volume 30/1983
• Eugen Härle : Prof. Dr. Ernst Trumpp (1828-1885) . In: Ilsfeld in past and present. A home book for Ilsfeld, Auenstein and Schozach . Ilsfeld municipality, Ilsfeld 1989
• Annemarie Schimmel : Ernst Trumpp, 1828-1885, a short outline of his life and work, Das Deutsch-Pakistani Forum, Karachi 1998.
• Trilochan Singh: Ernest Trumpp and WH McLeod as scholars of Sikh history, religion and culture , International Center of Sikh Studies, Chandigarh 1994.
• Gabriele Zeller: "... has become completely apostate from the Orientalia". Ernst Trumpp, an early student of Rudolf von Roth . In: Anna Aurelia Esposito u. a. (Ed.): "In her right hand she held a silver knife with a bell ...". Studies on Indian culture and literature , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2015, pp. 369–378, ISBN 978-3-447-10548-4 .

Web links

Wikisource: Ernst Trumpp  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Ernst Trumpp in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl von Prantl : Ernst Trumpp (obituary) . In: Meeting reports of the philosophical-philological and historical class of the KB Academy of Sciences in Munich . Year 1886, p. 142–145 ( online [PDF; accessed May 2, 2017]).