RELiCTA: why and what
RELiCTA's name alludes to the
both dormant and precarious nature of the extensive body of missionary tools. RELiCTA covers early modern linguistic and catechetical tools for non-European languages, offering
metadata such as authorship, place and date of publication, reprints. We hope that this database will increase general awareness of
the value of these sources — a necessary first step in fighting oblivion and loss. In addition, the
database will enable scholars to approach the body of missionary linguistic tools from a bird’s-eye
perspective.
RELiCTA aims to go beyond a mere collection of all relevant primary source material. We hope that the database can also shed light on the following questions:
- what is the approximate extent of linguistic and catechetical documents composed by missionary linguists? How many documents do we know of? How many are still preserved?
- what can be said, in a comparative way, about missionary linguistics in the Americas and in Asia in that period?
- what is the proportion between the number of grammars and the number of wordlists?
- which indigenous languages are often described, and which ones rarely or never?
- how is the succession of descriptions of certain languages in terms of time - shorter or longer periods?
Needless to say, RELiCTA has also its restrictions and limitations. It covers far from everything and it also copes with certain difficulties. Click the button for more information!
