John Sajnovics

* Tordas, 12 May 1733 – 4 May 1785, Buda / astronomer, linguist, Jesuit monk, employee of the Nagyszombat Observatory ; ; He was a descendant of a well-to-do Fehér County family. He started high school in Győr and finished it in Buda in 1747. He studied philosophy in Nagyszombat, theology in Vienna, and his specialist teacher training in Győr and Vienna. He taught in Bratislava and Eger for one year each. In 1758–1760, he was an assistant to Miksa Hell (Hegybánya) at the Vienna Court Observatory, and then from 1765 to 1772, he worked at the Nagyszombat Observatory as an assistant to Ferenc Weiss. In 1768, Hell took him to the northern part of Norway, to the island of Vardø, to observe the transit of the planet Venus in front of the Sun's disk on June 3, 1769. Sajnovics summarized the events and experiences of the trip in a diary, but he also reported on them in letters to his fellow monks in Nagyszombat. These were first published by Ottó Herman (Breznóbánya) in 1893 in his book Az széksi madárhegyek tájól. The scientific summary of the expedition was written by Miksa Hell. The accuracy of their measurements was also highly appreciated in professional circles of the time, although there were those who accused the two scientists of subsequently correcting the data. Sajnovics, encouraged by Hell, began to clarify the issue of the Hungarian-Lappish language relationship on site. ; Returning to Copenhagen, he reported on his results to the Danish scientific society and printed his work, the second edition of which was published in Nagyszombat, Hungary, in 1770, and for the first time published the full text of the Funeral Oration. On 19 January 1770, he was elected a member of the Royal Danish Academy together with Miksa Hell. His teaching proclaiming the Hungarian-Lappish linguistic kinship was received with indignation by the nobility at home, but some, such as the historian György Pray (Érsekújvár), already took a stand in favor of the northern kinship. Due to the many attacks, he gave up on implementing his further linguistic plans, and after the dissolution of the Jesuit order, from 1773 he was a professor of quantity at the Buda Academy and an assistant professor at the Buda Observatory. His work, which is the first significant attempt at Finno-Ugric language comparison, is of pioneering significance in the field of historical and comparative linguistics and has also caused a stir abroad. He was a diligent astronomical observer, making many thousands of observations with the outdated instruments of the Buda Observatory. His astronomy booklet (Idea Astronomiae…) is outstanding in the field of contemporary knowledge dissemination. ; ; His main works: ; Demonstratio Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse, 1770, ; Idea Astronomiae honoribus regiae Universitatis Budensis dicata, 1778.