Amerikanische Sprachenvielfalt und europäische Grammatiktradition. Missionarslinguistik im Epochenumbruch der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract

›Missionary linguistics‹ has been widely accepted as a term to refer to language descriptions by friars in colonial societies. However, both components of the term may be questioned. Linguistics in the strict sense of the term refers to scientific activities as established from 1800 onwards (Bopp, Grimm etc.). The application of this term to earlier periods disregards the fact that reflection on language was at that time integrated into intellectual frames dominated by philosophical interests, rhetorical purposes and didactic considerations. The missionary setting of Early Modern Times is quite different from what will be the missionary setting in late 19th century: the catechesis of the mendicant orders, dominicans and jesuits within Spanish and Portuguese dominated areas is part of a project establishing a new cultural order and should not be seen apart from the contemporary political and ecclesiastic discourse on Indian reality. Echoes of this discourse may be discovered in statements on language learning. These statements reflect at the same time a growing interest in grammatical description itself. The grammars produced within this framework have been analyzed to some degree by specialists of American languages focusing on the specific structures of these languages. On the other hand, historiography of linguistics has made serious progress in recent years by emancipating itself from language history. It is our interest to analyze early grammars of the American languages within a new theoretical framework that distinguishes clearly research programms (or models of knowledge) and research traditions (or group formation). As an example, we discuss the existence of a specifically jesuit tradition of grammar, undoubtedly backed by the sociological and intellectual impact of the Society of Jesus. In a theoretical perspective, the Latin grammar of Alvares (1572) was obligatory for all teaching purposes within the order, and the works of Bathe (1611) and Roboredo (1619) reflect an enthusiastic second language learning program based on the implicit hypothesis of language universals. A preliminary study of just three brazilian jesuit grammars reveals, in a diachronic perspective, an astonishing rearrangement of syntactic categories. From an epistemic point of view, American missionary linguistics continues the European project of grammatization which presupposes the adaptation of Latin grammatical categories to the vernacular languages. On the other hand, the immediate pragmatical aims of preaching and even more confession hearing, seems to guarantee the recognition of typological differences in grammatical description. In this way, the cultural project of creating new Christian Indian societies and the actual typological distance of the Amerindian languages with respect to the Latin model may have produced on the epistemic level a more radical transformation of linguistic concepts. Far beyond the transfer of supposedly theory-independent data, this transformation may have prepared, ultimately, modifications of the idea of language itself.