📄 Edward Ullendorff: From Emperor Haile Selassie to H. J. Polotsky. An Ethiopian and Semitic Miscellany

Summary

This is not a research paper but a short German-language book review, published in Aethiopica 1 (1998), not 2013 as the citation suggests. Manfred Kropp assesses the fourth, and by the author's own account probably final, volume of Edward Ullendorff's collected shorter writings (Äthiopistische Forschungen 42, Harrassowitz, 1995). He outlines its contents, which are mostly personal notices and obituaries, plus reviews, a manuscript catalogue and Semitic linguistics. He then asks what such author-centred reprint volumes are for. He notes that the gap between first publication and reprint has shrunk to almost nothing. Unlike thematic reprint series, these volumes are held together only by their author. Kropp suggests they foreshadow a different publishing model, in which each scholar keeps a structured, constantly updated and searchable database of their own work. He closes by arguing that as material grows more abundant and instantly comparable, direct teaching and mentorship matter more, illustrated by Ullendorff's relationship with H. J. Polotsky.

Key points

• The volume has 24 pieces: 10 are personal notices, 4 are longer reviews, and the rest include a catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and 2 items from Eugen Mittwoch's papers.
• In Kropp's view, the book's high point is the essay on the dativus ethicus, which originally came out in 1992 in volume 15 of the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam.
• He criticises the typewritten addenda (pp. XII–XIX) and index (pp. 176–193), and cites Getatchew Haile's regret that the review of Prutky's travels was reprinted without updates.
• The reprint interval kept shrinking: nearly a decade for the first volume, three years for the third (1987–1990), and near-simultaneous publication in 1994 for two pieces (the Polotsky obituary and the Isaiah/Ha'arets essay).
• Kropp sets these volumes against F. Sezgin's thematic reprints of Arab geographers, which he sees as producing genuinely "new books."

Interesting ideas

• I1. Kropp contrasts a frozen "diplomatic reprint" with a working copy that keeps accumulating corrections, and treats the gap between them as a real design dilemma; keeping the original intact plus an explicit corrections layer resolves it.
• I2. A collection gains value when it is organised by theme rather than by source, because grouping scattered material can mend breaks and forgotten links in a tradition.
• I3. Kropp imagines scholarship as a markup-encoded, continuously updated, queryable database in place of static printed volumes.
• I4. His closing argument is that abundant, instantly available material makes guided teaching more important, because a teacher supplies categories and good questions.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (learn): store treebank and silver-data fixes as a separate, versioned correction layer over the untouched source, so every repair stays traceable and can be undone.
• I2 (world): build compiled knowledge (verb classes, ontology, facts) around topics and link entries from many sources, rather than keeping per-source dumps.
• I3 (world): keep the knowledge graph as one living, structured store with provenance and revision history that the readers can query directly.
• I4 (learn): pair large silver corpora with curated LLM teacher tiers and staged curricula that point the learner to informative cases, instead of relying on volume alone.