A contribution to the history of missionary grammars and Romance languages grammars: The commensurability of metalanguage and categories in the sixteenth century

Abstract

This chapter is based on a comparison of two kinds of grammars written in the sixteenth century: Romance language grammars and grammars written within the framework of missionary linguistics. Despite their different contexts of production and their different objectives and scope, all these grammars books share some historical characteristics. They were written in the early period of grammatization of the described languages, and they are the result of the technical and theoretical transfer of the Latin model toward the description of new languages, so they inherited the same categories, description proceedings, and terminology. The focus is on the terminology that grammarians used to refer to the difference between the target language and Latin grammar, mainly when they observed the absence of Latin categories or specific forms in the language described.