Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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Scholar of Semitic and Eastern languages and literatures; professor of Eastern languages at the University of Göttingen. His earliest publications are under the name Bötticher (Boetticher), the name of his father, which he later replaced by de Lagarde (sometimes Latinized into Lagardius), a name that existed in his mother’s family.
Born in Berlin, de Lagarde studied theology and oriental languages in Berlin
and in Halle, where he habilitated in 1851. In the following years, he spent
much time in the British Museum in London, where he was among the first
Western scholars to study the Syriac manuscripts that had arrived from
In addition to his publications in such fields as Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian,
Coptic, and Septuagint, de Lagarde published a number of Syriac texts: the
Didascalia Apostolorum (1854); other collections of ecclesiastical law
(1856);
Analecta Syriaca (1858) and Praetermissorum libri duo (1879; which has Syriac
printed in Hebrew characters). He also planned a series entitled Bibliotheca Syriaca, of which, however, he was able
to prepare only the first volume which, after his death, his student A.
Rahlfs edited (1892). Whereas in his public and university life de Lagarde
did not shy away from expressing strong views — thereby sometimes provoking
harsh reactions and controversy, not least with his Jewish colleagues — his
Syriac work is sober and very solid. Most of his editions have been often
reprinted and are still valuable today (some of them have never been
replaced!). De Lagarde’s interests extended beyond philology and text
editions, into the fields of linguistics and lexicography. Quite impressive
for his day is his list of ‘Persian, Armenian, and Indian words in Syriac’
(included in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen), which is
often quoted in C. Brockelmann’s Lexicon
Syriacum.
De Lagarde was known for his painstaking attention to correct and precise
typesetting, reflecting the ms. model as closely as possible. Towards the
end of his life he seems to have been instrumental in the development of a
new Syriac printing type by the Leipzig printing house Drugulin. He did not
live to see it used in his own publications, but it was successfully used
from the early 1890s onwards, and it was eternalized in the second edition
of Nöldeke’s Kurzgefasste syrische Grammatik (1898;
repr. 1966) and in its subsequent English translation (1904; repr.
2001).
A volume to commemorate de Lagarde’s Syriac work in Göttingen was published
in 1968 by the Göttinger Arbeitskreis für syrische Kirchengeschichte.
Several of the contributions deal with topics on which de Lagarde himself
had published or — as in the case of