Missionary Linguistics Research Articles

Redeeming a killer language: Protestant missionaries’ engagements with Bangala and Lingala in the Belgian Congo, 1900–1935

ABSTRACT Situated within the field of colonial and missionary linguistics, this paper discusses language-interventionist campaigns by Protestant missionaries working in the Belgian Congo, in particular their work on the languages Bangala and Lingala between 1900 and 1935. This time frame commences with a master plan to transform Bangala, by first “redeeming” it of its pidgin features, into “a killer language,” with the aim of supplanting all local languages utilized in Protestant missionary work. It closes with the establishment of a Lingala Committee, its attempts at creating a “Union Ngala,” and the first publication on Lingala by Baptist missionary Malcolm Guthrie in 1935, whose Lingala work would change the Protestants’ policy towards the language for good. The period between these two junctures was marked by resistance within Protestant circles against the master plan, attempts to counteract the resistance, and, above all, a wide range of debates and discussions, all manifesting notable language ideologies.

Lexical Language Contact Phenomena: A Combined Model Based on the Vocabulario español-guarani (18th century)

Abstract The purpose of this work, which falls within the areas of lexicography (studying missionary linguistics) and sociolinguistics (studying cultural contact), is to analyse the linguistic and cultural contacts between Spanish and Guarani, based on lexicographic material extracted from the Vocabulario español-guarani by Pablo Restivo (1728). The basis of the analysis is provided by the names of animals—one of the ‘secular’ fields where the highest frequency of borrowings is found (Cerno & Obermeier 2013). The methodology applied is the Haspelmath model (2009) and the Gruda model (2018). The premise is that the arrival and work of the Jesuit missionaries created cultural contact that is reflected in the codified language and, in turn, in this dictionary of the time. The main contribution is a new combined model of lexical reflections in a situation of cultural contact that can be applied in the analysis of this kind of lexicographic work, while an additional section provides a presentation of Restivo’s work and its background.

Unsung Heroes of Mission Bible Translation in Colonial West Africa: Ludwig Adzaklo of the Bremen Mission in German Togoland

The Africanisation of Christianity in Africa is closely linked to the availability of the Bible in African mother tongues. However, mission-led Bible translation in Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not solely the work of European missionary linguists. Africans, such as Ludwig Adzaklo of the Bremen Mission, played essential roles in this process. Nevertheless, African translators like him were considered as mere Sprachgehilfe (language assistants) to the missionaries and not as co-translators. After a postcolonial analysis of archival data on the translation of the Old Testament into Ewe by Ludwig Adzaklo and Jakob Spieth, this study argues that Adzaklo was not just Spieth’s Sprachgehilfe but a co-translator on the project. Being referred to as Spieth’s Sprachgehilfe was a colonial-missionary label that denied Adzaklo’s agency in mission-led Bible translation in Africa. Therefore, the study suggests that Adzaklo should be viewed as an early Ewe mother-tongue Bible translator in the history of West African Christianity.

A Grammatica Portugueza para uso da Escola Portugueza de Trangambar e o contraste entre línguas

In Trangambar (Tranquebar), on the coast of Coromandel (India), between 1725 and 1731, a Grammatica Portugueza came to light. Published in the Danish mission of that locality, this work has four parts, each focused to different aspects of the Portuguese language. Its author, Nikolaus Dal (1690-1747), was a German born in Denmark, who learned Portuguese in India, a language in which he wrote several works. The existence of a Portuguese school in Tranquebar, which was never a Portuguese possession, shows the importance of Portuguese language in that region, where it functioned as a "lingua franca", and justifies the printing of a grammar. The purpose of this study is to contextualize Dal's grammar in the so-called "missionary linguistics" and in Portuguese grammaticography. The following subjects exposed in the four parts of the grammar are examined, among others: the comparison of the pronunciation of Portuguese with other European languages and with the local language (Tamil), and some aspects of the lexicon.

Missionary linguistics in the East Indies in the seventeenth century

Abstract In recent years, there has been increased academic interest in missionary linguistics. However, whereas much has been written on Spanish missionary linguistics, above all in the Americas, relatively little has been published on Dutch missionary linguistics. This article aims to address this situation by analyzing the texts written in Malay by Dutch missionary linguists in the seventeenth century in the East Indies, now Indonesia. It begins by providing an account of the history of the Malay language, focusing above all on the influence of other languages including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Portuguese on the Malay lexicon. It then describes the activities of the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian archipelago. After providing a comprehensive account of the texts that the Dutch missionary linguists wrote in Malay, the article analyzes the linguistic strategies that they employed as they attempted to overcome the gap between their language and culture and the Malay language and the culture in which it was embedded. It does so using a fourfold typology: loanwords, loan translations or calques; periphrasis and conceptual transfer. The picture that emerges is that authors made extensive use of all four strategies to communicate the Christian Gospel in Malay. One interesting result is that Dutch missionary linguistics used very few Dutch loanwords in their Malay texts. The article analyzes possible reasons for this.

Estratégias e praticas de tradução do Padre Joaquim Gonçalves

Translation plays a crucial role in the mission of evangelization and education of indigenous languages carried out by missionaries. However, its relevance has often been overlooked in studies conducted within the field of missionary linguistics as well as in the history of translation. Joaquim Afonso Gonçalves (1781–1841) stands as one of the most prominent figures in European sinology, particularly renowned for his trilogy composed of Arte China (1829), Diccionario Portuguez-China (1831), and Diccionario China-Portuguez (1833). This innovative language learning method for teaching Chinese to Westerners in the Far East has garnered significant recognition. The bilingual resources encompassed within this tripartite corpus enable a wide range of contrastive studies, including the study of translation, a monumental didactic tool that is also a major objective of missionary teaching. The author's translation strategies are rarely explicitly documented in his works: only two manifestos found in the preface of his first dictionary touch upon the technique of adaptation through domestication and the use of loanwords within the context of foreignization – two fundamental strategies in modern translation theory. This study will firstly interpret these two observations, along with other scattered reflections on translation found throughout the interconnected three volumes. Subsequently, an analysis of the author's translation practices will be conducted, aiming to comprehend the choices and challenges encountered by the author in the process of converting intercultural references. The outcome of this study will shed light on the significance of these bilingual instructional materials for the study of translation between Portuguese and Chinese.

Missionary Linguistics and the Protestant Policies for Missionary (Re)translations (English into Judeo-Spanish) in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract Missionary Linguistics attempts to analyze texts either written or (re)translated by missionaries, especially those produced by Spanish and Portuguese ministers in Latin America and Asia. However, some more specific case studies have been taken for granted, such as the case of the Scottish Protestant missionaries who wanted to convert Sephardic Jews in Constantinople in the nineteenth century. This article aims to illustrate the origin of the re(translation) policies of Protestant missionaries, such as those of the Free Church of Scotland mission in the nineteenth century. Moreover, we will describe the theoretical basis of Missionary Linguistics and the existing link between this innovative and modern branch of linguistics and Colonial Linguistics, thus showing common grounds as well as a way in which both could be combined into a single research field.

Entangled Histories, Catholic Missions and Languages

This essay focuses on the heterogeneous missionary contexts connected to the Portuguese Empire, in the hemisphere assigned to Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529), ranging from Brasil, Sub-Saharan Africa, to India, Vietnam, China and Japan. In these plural missionary contexts, between ca. 1540 to 1650, Portuguese was used, mostly by the Jesuits and their more numerous local native mediators, as translational language for several idioms unknown in Europe. These early modern linguistic and cultural translations of living languages based on Portuguese as translational language, have largely been overlooked outside of the field of missionary linguistics. This essay highlights instead their strong documentary potential, meaning and implications, beyond linguistics, with respect to current debates on early modern global history and its periodization.

The Dictionarium Latino Nankinense and Nanjing Guanhua

Adopting different points of view, this article analyzes a manuscript recently discovered in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the Dictionarium Latino Nankinense juxta Materiarum ordinem dispositum, handwritten by the French Jesuit missionary Benjamin Brueyre. It focuses in particular on the discovery’s potential importance for the study of Qing dynasty Nanjing Mandarin, while referencing its implications on the cross-cultural interactions between China and Europe. After an introduction presenting other fundamental texts compiled in Nanjing Mandarin by Western missionaries and scholars, the first section details the most commonly accepted grammatical theoretical framework for distinguishing Beijing Mandarin and Nanjing Mandarin. In the second section, the author presents the manuscript in detail, describing its purpose, its possible sources, and some of its linguistic peculiarities, particularly the lexicological, lexicographical, and grammatical features, as well as some illustrative examples of cross-cultural translations. Finally, in the third section, using the framework presented in the first, the author shows that the Dictionarium is a text mixing linguistic features from different varieties of Mandarin. As highlighted by the approach of missionary linguistics, the manuscript is a rare and important record of lexicological, lexicographical, grammatical, and romanization features of late Qing dynasty Chinese and deserves further research from both historical linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives.

Traducción del mundo animal: El caso del Vocabulario de lengua guarani de Blas Pretovio

The objective of this article is to analyse the lexicographic equivalents in the Spanish-Guarani bilingual dictionary composed by the Jesuit Blas Pretovio, Vocabulary of the Guarani language (1728), a copy of which is currently in the Jagiellonian Library. The research corpus consists of the excerpted names of animals because it is a semantic field in which, we can assume, the differences in the extra-linguistic reality will be reflected in various translation mechanisms. Although at first glance we are dealing with a classic list of equivalents in a bilingual dictionary, it turns out that the microstructure of the dictionary reveals a lot about the author’s lexicographic awareness, whether it is the definiendum (which names seem important to the potential dictionary reader) and the definiens (how the names of the animals are translated, what other information we find in the dictionary entries, etc.). In addition, this study constitutes material to help investigate the state of the Spanish language in the 18th century and the so-called Jesuit Guarani used in the Guarani missions and, to the same degree, it reveals much about the extralinguistic world and linguistic-cultural contacts in the Jesuit reductions. This study, beyond its evident lexicographic focus, is situated within the so-called missionary linguistics and, even partially, is an attempt to help complete the vast and relatively little-explored area of Hispanic-Amerindian lexicography.

… and the Word was God: Missionary Linguistics and Missionary Grammar. Ed. by Even Hovdhaugen

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Tradução, Evangelização e Negociação Linguística: uma Exploração Interdisciplinar

A tradução da doutrina cristã para as línguas nativas americanas durante a época colonial espanhola apresenta importantes questionamentos para a tradutologia, os quais incitam a análise multi e interdisciplinar. No presente artigo, examinamos o estado da questão da linguística missionária, e do tratamento que foi dado ao encontro cultural que aconteceu entre indígenas nahuas e missionários na Nova Espanha durante o século XVI, desde a filosofia, para realizar uma análise de dois exemplos de tradução com fins de evangelização retirados dos Coloquios de 1524 do frei Bernardino de Sahagún (1986). Relacionamos alguns paralelismos entre o caso colonial e certas iniciativas atuais, e sublinhamos a pertinência de alguns conceitos da linguística, da tradutologia e da filosofia para analisar o problema da comunicação intercultural, assim como o fundamento político e cultural subjacente no caso da Nova Espanha. O tema leva-nos à seguinte pergunta: em que medida essas traduções, realizadas em conjunto por indígenas e missionários, foram um fator relevante de resistência cultural diante dos embates colonialistas de imposição religiosa?

MARUYAMA Tōru: Missionary Linguistics in Japan - Konkani, Kongo and Japanese Linguistic Texts in Portuguese

MARUYAMA Tōru: Missionary Linguistics in Japan - Konkani, Kongo and Japanese Linguistic Texts in Portuguese

Ideologí­as lingüísticas en las obras misionero-coloniales sobre el mapudungun (Valdivia, Febres y Havestadt)

Estudiamos las ideologí­as lingüísticas en las obras misionero-coloniales referidas al mapudungun: Arte (Luis de Valdivia, 1606), Arte (Andrés Febres, 1765) y Chilidúgú (Bernardo de Havestadt, 1777). Para ello, establecemos relaciones teóricas entre ideologí­as lingüísticas y lingüística misionera, y definimos un estudio interpretativo. En el análisis nos centramos en la concepción del mapudungun como lengua general y en la universalidad-particularidad del lenguaje. A partir de esto, corroboramos la presencia de ideologí­as lingüísticas en el conjunto, lo cual justifica su empleo como corpus.

De Montoya a Restivo. Apuntes para un estudio sistemático de los vocabularios castellano-guaraní en el Paraguay jesuítico (1640-1722)

A pesar de su interés para la filología hispano-amerindia, los "Vocabularios" castellano-guaraní de Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1640) y Pablo Restivo (1722) no se han estudiado de manera sistemática. Constituyen sin embargo testimonios privilegiados de la política lingüística del Paraguay jesuítico. Cotejando ambos diccionarios en clave diacrónica, ofrecemos un análisis a la vez cuantitativo y cualitativo de su contenido, mediante una base de datos relacional y un enfoque conceptual inspirado en la lingüística misionera. Se privilegia el examen de tres fenómenos lexicográficos emblemáticos del siglo XVIII: el progresivo reconocimiento de la autoridad oral y letrada de los locutores indígenas, la creciente hispanización del léxico asociado a la ganadería y la persistencia de taxonomías y ontologías animistas.

Missionary descriptions of Mande languages: verbal morphology in 19th century grammars

Abstract In spite of the prominent role of missionary linguists in shaping the field of modern African linguistics, the approaches adopted in their early grammar descriptions remain virtually unstudied, just as the descriptions themselves are largely ignored by modern linguists. This study explores the ways two 19th century missionary grammarians, R. Maxwell MacBrair and John Kemp, approached the task of describing verbal morphology of two languages from the Mande family, Mandinka and Susu. I discuss important differences between their approach and the one that has become prevalent in modern descriptive studies; these differences reflect to a large extent the different interests and goals of missionary and academic linguists. I also use the example of the two early grammars to illustrate the diversity of attitudes and approaches to language description concealed behind the label “missionary linguistics”. Even in the narrow domain of verbal morphology – which is far from prominent in the isolating Mande languages – the two grammarians resort to very different strategies for coping with the otherness of the material they describe. The diversity gives us a glimpse of the early stages of the development of a typology-sensitive descriptive tradition that informed the study of African languages as we presently know it.

Between Languages, Genres and Cultures: Diego Collado’s Linguistic Works

Dominican Diego Collado can be rightfully counted among the most influential missionaries of the sunset of the Christian Century in Japan. Although he spent only three years there, between 1619 and 1622, and never achieved the palm of martyrdom, it transformed the rest of his life. After his return to Europe, he fought vehemently against the Jesuit monopoly in Japan at the Roman curia and the court in Madrid. While severe Christian persecution was raging in the land of the rising sun, he prepared a plan for an ambitious and highly controversial project for a new Dominican congregation devoted only to the missionary activity in Japan and China. This endeavour failed bitterly. His literary activity was similarly focused on a single goal – to promote his mission. He wrote multiple reports disputing and fighting the Jesuits, finished and published a history of the Christianisation of Japan from the Dominican perspective, and – most importantly for this article – composed three linguistic works: a grammar of the Japanese language, a Latin-Spanish-Japanese dictionary and a Japanese-Latin model confession. This study understands these three influential works as a trilogy that should be treated together as mutually complementary. It recognises them not only as examples of missionary linguistics but as part of a long European (and, in particular, Latin) tradition of language description, language learning and pastoral care.

Japanese Linguistics as Reflected in Material by Western Missionaries

Kirishitan materials, which were produced by Catholic missionaries between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century, have long been studied to research the history of Japanese phonemes and grammar. More recently, however, they have also been studied increasingly in other fields, such as missionary linguistics and other disciplines in the humanities. In missionary linguistics, Kirishitan materials are examined along with other products of missionaries that were based on European linguistics, as seen in the case of the Latin-Portuguese-Japanese dictionary Dictionarium Latino Lusitanicum, ac Iaponicum by the Jesuits.

A historiographical approach to Paul Perny’s grammar of the Chinese language

ABSTRACT This paper revisits, from a historiographical perspective, the Grammaire de la langue chinoise orale et écrite (1873–76) by French missionary Paul Perny, a fundamental and representative work of French missionary linguistics of the 19th century which, over the years, fell into oblivion. As a missionary grammar, we should also place it in a context of profound changes in which academic sinology strongly emerges under the auspices of French political interests in China. Moreover, through the study of several sources we will show how this work was received by the academic sinologists contemporary with Perny. This will allow us to address the relationship that this missionary linguist had with them. This research also focuses on another aspect, related to Perny’s stance on the academic discussion dealing with the alleged inferiority of Chinese with respect to inflected languages, which was a widespread idea at that time.

American Philological Associations: Latin and Amerindian Languages

This article questions the common assumption that missionary linguists in early colonial Spanish America believed indigenous languages could be governed by the principles of Latin. Passages from sixteenth-century artes or manuals of Quechua, Nahuatl and P'urépecha show that their authors were compelled either to abandon or transform radically the precepts of classical and Renaissance authorities on grammar. Latin, however, did play a crucial part in the production of translations and original texts in Amerindian languages, which, with certain provisos, lay open an important field of future research for classical philologists and literary historians.