Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 39, Issue 2-3, 2012

There is no need to repeat earlier complaints that the historiography of missionary linguistics was being neglected, since the situation has changed considerably sine the last decades of the past century. The first decade of the 21st century in particular has witnessed a veritable explosion of research activities. This article surveys the state of the art in the field of recent work in the historiographical subfield called ‘Missionary linguistics’, covering the period 2002–2012. It represents an update of Zimmermann (2004) and provides separate sections devoted to earlier studies of missionary linguistics, international conferences, published volumes, journals, reprints and editions of primary sources, exhibitions and other activities related to the subject. The reference list is divided in two sections, (1) primary sources, with some 140 entries, and (2) secondary sources, including more than 300 titles. It is hoped that this account will suggest several additional research topics and inspire scholars to make further advances in this fascinating field of research.

The grammar, dictionary, and religious texts by Friar Juan Baptista de Lagunas (c.1530–1604) are three works that the author conceived as complementary and published within one cover (1574). Nevertheless, the content of each book is rather different in the theme developed and the influences that oriented its realization. The works of the French Franciscan monk Maturino Gilberti (c.1498–1585) had a great impact on all three texts; the Arte in particular. Lagunas’ dictionary, however, follows Ambrogio Calepino (c.1435–1511), while his doctrinal texts are guided by Catholic religious teachings. Furthermore, each of the three texts has its own pagination. Despite these details, the unity of the three texts as one single volume can be shown by the textual coherence achieved through the cross-references between them and by the printing decisions taken at the moment of production, both factors that strengthen the argument supporting the intertextual unity of Lagunas’ oeuvre.

Charles-Louis Longchamp (1802–1874) was the dominant figure in Latin studies in Geneva in the 1850s and 1860s and had a formative influence on the Latin teachers of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Longchamp’s work was in the grammaire générale tradition, which, on account of historical anomalies falling out from the Genevese Revolution of 1846 to 1848, was still being taught in Geneva up to the mid-1870s, despite having been put aside in France in the 1830s and 1840s. Longchamp succeeded briefly in getting his Latin grammars onto the school curriculum, replacing those imported from France, which Longchamp argued were making the Genevese mentally indistinguishable from the French, weakening their power to think for themselves and putting their political independence at risk. His own grammars offered “a sort of bulwark against invasion by the foreign mind, a guarantee against annexation”. Longchamp’s pedagogical approach had echoes in Saussure’s teaching of Germanic languages in Paris in the 1880s, and in the ‘stylistics’ of Saussure’s successor Charles Bally (1865–1947).

This article examines common motifs in the accounts of the sound systems of Iroquoian, Polynesian and Khoesan languages as the most well-known cases of extremes in phonetic complexity. On the basis of examples from European and American scholarship between the 17th and early 20th century, we investigate continuities in the description of their seemingly ‘exotic’ inventories and phonotactic structures when viewed from the perspective of European languages. We also demonstrate the influence of phonetic accounts on the interpretation of other components of language and their role in the construction of biased images of the languages and their speakers. Finally, we show that controversies in descriptions of ‘exotic’ languages concern issues that remain relevant in modern phonetic research, in particular complexity of phonological systems, while notions which were conceived as ‘misconceptions’ have re-emerged as unresolved research questions, e.g., the status of clicks and small and large consonant inventories.

This article discusses the origins and formation of the notion of ‘metalinguistics’ in Mixail Mixajlovič Baxtin’s (1895–1975) writings. It is argued that the discussion of metalinguistics and the division of labour within the study of language in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s may have exerted a more profound influence on the formation of Baxtin’s linguistic views than was previously thought. The article investigates the nature and extent of this interaction and shows that there are interesting parallels between Baxtin’s conception of metalinguistics and the metalinguistics writings of George L. Trager (1906–1992). This suggests that, apart from any purely terminological influence, the way in which Baxtin defined the scope of his metalinguistics as a specific discipline separate from linguistics may have been inspired by the writings of the American structuralists.

The native Syriac linguistic tradition comprises annotations to the biblical text (‘masorah’), lexica, and grammars created between the 6th and 13th centuries; 24 Syriac scholars are known by name. Syriac grammarians have been considered to be mere imitators, of both Greek and Arab grammarians, but this is a severe exaggeration; they were, however, the source of much that is found among the Arabs. The first, Jacob of Edessa (640–708 A.D.), and the last, Gregory Bar Hebraeus (1225/26–1286), have received the most attention. Much needs to be done, both in publishing and evaluating Syriac linguistic work, and in recognizing its importance in cross-connecting the West Asian civilizations and in foreshadowing modern approaches to language. This article provides a guide and key to the literature.