Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 35, Issue 1-2, 2008

This paper attempts to establish the authorship of a milestone in the development of the concept of the Indo-European language family, the dissertation De lingua vetustissima Europae (Wittenberg, 1686). Since the work of G. J. Metcalf in 1966 and 1974, this dissertation has been ascribed to Andreas Jäger (c.1660–1730), the Swedish student who played the part of respondens in the public disputation in which the dissertation was discussed. The paper sets out the arguments for identifying Georg Caspar Kirchmaier, the praeses in that disputation, as at least the collaborative author of the De lingua vetustissima. It examines a crucial mistaken argument of Metcalf’s, shows that it was usual in the late 17th and early 18th centuries for the praeses to write such a dissertation alone or in collaboration with the respondens, discusses the testimony of contemporaries in this particular case, and remarks on the relationship of the dissertation to Kirchmaier’s own scholarly interests.

The hypothesis that the three indigenous Caucasian language stocks (Abkhaz-Adyghean, Nakh-Daghestanian, and Kartvelian) are genetically related has little support at the present day among linguists specializing in these languages. Nonetheless, the so-called ‘Ibero-Caucasian’ hypothesis had strong institutional backing in Soviet Caucasology, especially in Georgia, and continues to be invoked in certain contemporary discourses of a political and identitarian nature. In this paper the history of the Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis will be presented against the background of research into the autochthonous languages of the North and South Caucasus, and also in connection with the historiographic debate over the relation of Abkhazia to Georgia.

This article reconsiders various aspects of missionary linguistics on the Pacific Northwest Coast in the late 19th century. In particular, it explores the complex relationship between Alfred Hall’s (1853–1918) A Grammar of the Kwagiutl Language (1888) and Charles Harrison’s (d.1926) Haida Grammar (1895), and it is shown that, in many cases, both the basic analytical framework and the clarificatory examples that Harrison used were largely derived from Hall’s work. Such connections have not been recognised previously, and yet they are of importance, since they indicate that traditional Graeco-Roman categories and paradigms were not the only templates used by missionaries who were seeking to analyse the indigenous languages of North America. In addition, Hall’s and Harrison’s accounts of numerals in Kwak’wala and Haida (respectively) are reassessed, and it is suggested that their analyses were influenced by the classificatory approaches presented in contemporaneous studies of non-Western languages (e.g., Japanese).

This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the descriptive challenges confronting them (ergative case-marking, noun-class systems, compound verb constructions, etc.). Rather than being rigidly bound by the Latinate model, they modified it in various ways (usually not explicitly discussed), including by using traditional terminology in novel ways.