Evolving views on the world's languages

Introduction

The RELiCTA database is to be seen against the backdrop of an interdisciplinary research project "Evolving views on the world's languages in a globalizing world (1540-1840): information growth, conceptual shifts, scholarly networks in the circulation of linguistic knowledge" which was carried out at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), in close collaboration with the Center for the Historiography of Linguistics. It focused on the study of the activities of missionary linguistics in the Americas and in Asia, in the period 1500-1800 approximately.

The project (registered at KU Leuven as project C-1 [KUL] 3H150301), supported by the Research Council of the University of Leuven, was led by a team of two historiographers of linguistics (Toon Van Hal and Pierre Swiggers), a specialist in translation and cultural translation (Lieve Behiels) and a historian, specialist in the Modern Age (16th, 17th and 18th centuries) (Werner Thomas). The project had two PhD-students who, in their doctoral thesis, investigate complementary aspects of missionary linguistics activities and their consequences for the history of knowledge. Zanna Van Loon, a historian, studied mainly aspects linked to the history of the book (including manuscripts), to the involvement of religious orders, and to the various stages of the circulation of knowledge (production, diffusion, reception). Andy Peetermans, philologist, focused on the contents of linguistic descriptions. Both focus on the production related to the languages of the Americas.

In the framework of the project, we were happy to welcome to international researchers, dealing with different areas and periods. This has allowed for enriching the historiographical perspectives and refining the general methodology of the project. During their respective stays, Dr. Marlon James Sales has studied the linguistic (and linguistic-cultural) production of languages in the Philippines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Fulbright scholar Doyle Calhoun has studied the 'missionary' and 'colonial' linguistic production of languages in sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century.

The project’s objectives

Situated within the field of studies of missionary linguistics, the project focuses on the linguistic work of missionaries in their religious, political and socio-economic context. It aims to describe and analyze the complex process of the elaboration (constitution and 'production'), diffusion and reception of the tools that were created to understand, learn, handle and teach the indigenous languages that the missionaries found in territories outside of Europe where they had to propagate the Christian faith. The complexity of this process – a long chain of events, changes and circuits – is explained by the multiplicity of factors involved: individual, institutional, cultural, ideological and, of course, merely material factors (travel conditions, the presence or not of a printing press, etc.).

Needless to say, it is not possible to integrate the contents of all descriptive 'products' (sometimes very diverse in their organization and conception) of the linguistic work of the missionaries, nor the impact of all these factors, within the scope of a single project. For this reason, the project is dedicated to providing the community of historians of linguistics and linguistic-cultural knowledge with (a) a 'documentary collection' that can be exploited in the long term, and (b) models of analysis (which are illustrated in great detail in the doctoral theses of the PhD-Students).

The constitution of a solid data base (RELiCTA), will be able to nourish, in a lasting way, research on missionary linguistics, as it allows the reconstruction of the constitution and circulation of linguistic-missionary knowledge to be broadened, refined and enriched.

In close relationship with this documentary database, the project presents also models of analysis. On the one hand, it will be a matter of developing a (flexible) model of analysis to understand and expose the stages, instances, incident factors, variable modalities of the constitution (both 'material' and 'cognitive') and of the circulation of knowledge about languages and cultures that have been the object of evangelization. On the other hand, it is a matter of constructing a model of analysis, also flexible, in order to trace not only the descriptive 'formats', metalanguage, the role of tradition(s), grammatical or lexicographical options and decisions, but also the gaps and omissions, the hesitations, even the contradictions in the 'products' of missionary linguistics.

The (book)-historical approach

Zanna Van Loon’s PhD dissertation combines the history of missionary linguistics with book history (including the history of manuscript material) and the ‘new history of knowledge’. In terms of geographical coverage, it involves a comparative analysis of missionary linguistic (and catechetical) production in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, and in the Nouvelle France (‘New France’). Its chronological coverage extends from ca. 1500 to ca. 1750. The various stages and agents in the process of producing linguistic-cultural knowledge are accounted for, starting from an historical-philological approach and moving to a history-of-science point of view: acquisition, assimilation, production and formatting, diffusion, and reception of knowledge-contents. In studying the processes of elaboration and exploitation of knowledge an important role has to be assigned, not only to material conditions pertaining to the ‘infrastructure’ of knowledge production (such as the availability of a printing press), but also, and primarily, to political and institutional factors. The research agenda required a combination of prosopographical research, history of religious orders, cultural history and ethnohistory, and, inevitably, history of ideas and of ‘circulation of knowledge’; in terms of specific guiding questions, answers had to be given to the following questions: who acquired cultural-linguistic knowledge, in which context and for what purposes? who elaborated and calibrated this knowledge for subsequent use, in which setting and under what conditions, in which format, and to what aims?; who profited from this knowledge, in what form and to what intent, and under which conditions? Answers to these questions can only be provided if we follow the long, and complex path starting from time and place of the ‘originating’ of knowledge ad leading, through its adaptation and formatting – often under the control of ‘supervising’ instances –, to its perusal and exploitation.

The linguistic approach

Andy Peetermans’ PhD dissertation centers on the question which strategies Spanish Catholic missionary grammarians developed in order to tackle the descriptive and didactic challenges posed by the unfamiliar typological realities of Amerindian languages. In general terms, these grammarians’ common frame of reference was constituted by the time-honored tradition of Latin grammar, a rich repository of frameworks, concepts, terms, and organizational and discursive patterns which the missionaries could safely assume to be part of their audience’s educational background. The interplay between the Latin grammatical framework and Amerindian linguistic structures is explored by means of three case studies, illustrating how missionary grammarians made use of the material offered by Latin grammar to arrive at didactically successful descriptions of some of their object languages’ more challenging characteristics:
(1) Numerals. On the one hand, numerals are subject to considerable typological differences, and pointing out their underlying patterns of analogy allows for more efficient learning. On the other hand, the Latin grammatical tradition had little to offer by way of obvious models for the discussion of numerals. Did missionary grammarians treat numerals, and what strategies were used when they did?
(2) Internal word structure. On the one hand, most languages the missionaries described are highly synthetic and agglutinative. This seems to call for a metalanguage for talking about the meaningful parts of words (morphemes). On the other hand, the Latin tradition did not have a lot to offer in this regard and was in fact – in principle at least – skeptical of the idea of entities smaller than words being able to carry meaning. What strategies did missionary grammarians use to fill this metalinguistic lacuna?
(3) Object agreement. On the one hand, many languages the missionaries described possess some kind of verb-object agreement, a feature which would seem to call for elucidation. On the other hand, it was (understandably) absent from the Latin grammatical tradition. What strategies did missionaries use to approach the description of this linguistic feature?
These case studies show that those missionary grammarians whose work has been preserved to the present day were not unduly given to slavish copying of their Latin model at the expense of descriptive, explanatory, or didactic adequacy, but were able to approach it in relatively unrestricted and sometimes ingenious ways. In many cases, tensions between the didactic model and the linguistic realities to be described led to interesting adaptations and extensions of the Latin paradigm, which were however firmly grounded in concepts, categories, strategies, or intuitions found in the Latin grammatical tradition. As later missionary grammarians could build not only on European grammar but also on an ever-growing corpus of ‘American’ predecessors, they were led to engage ever more with the work of previous missionary grammarians. Through time, this resulted in the genesis of American strands of grammar developing in parallel with the European grammar they originated from and growing increasingly more self-sufficient.

Publications

  • Behiels, L. (2018). La traducción como alimento y otras enseñanzas: una exploración temática de los prólogos de textos doctrinales misioneros americanos. Hermeneus, 20, 11-35. doi: 10.24197/her.20.2018.11-35
  • Behiels, L., Van Hal, T., Van Loon, Z., Peetermans, A., Swiggers, P., Thomas, W. (2020). Lingüística misionera y circulación del saber (siglos XVI‒XVIII): un proyecto interdisciplinar. Anales de Lingüística - Segunda época.
  • Calhoun, D. (2017). Reading paratexts in missionary linguistic works: an analysis of the preface to the Holy Ghost Fathers’ (1855) Dictionnaire français-wolof et wolof-français. Language & History 60 (1), 53-72.
  • Calhoun, D. (2017). What gets lost in the digital (re-)presentation of older linguistic texts: digital editions, manuscript reality, and a new generation of online corpora. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 27 (1), 137–166
  • Peetermans, A., Van Hal, T. (sup.), Swiggers, P. (cosup.) (2020). The art of transforming traditions: Conceptual developments in early modern American missionary grammar writing.
  • Pytlowany, A., Van Hal, T. (2016). Merchants, scholars and languages. The circulation of linguistic knowledge in the context of the Dutch United East India Company (VOC). HEL: Histoire, Épistémologie, Langage, 38, 19-38.
  • Sales, M. J. (2018). Translation and interpreting in the early modern Philippines: a preliminary survey. Perspectives, 26(1), 54-68. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2017.1342668
  • Sales, M.J. (2019). Tagalog missionary grammars as a translation resource: translation, book history, and the production of linguistic knowledge in the Spanish Philippines. Comparative Critical Studies, 16(2-3), doi:10.3366/ccs.2019.0332
  • Sales, M.J. (2019). Translation (in/of/as) history: toward a model for historicising translation in Hispanic Filipino literature. Translation and Interpreting, 11(2), 32-44, doi:10.12807/ti.111202.2019.a04
  • Swiggers, P.; Thomas, W.; Van Hal, T. (accepted): On the ‘affinities of Oriental languages’: Wilhelm von Humboldt and his British connections. Missionary Linguistics, ed. by O. Zwartjes et al.
  • Thomas, W. (2019). Validating linguistic knowledge of Amerindian languages. In: F.J. Dijksterhuis (Eds.), Regulating knowledge in an early modern world, Chapt. 6. (Knowledge societies in history, 4). Abingdon: Routledge. [Accepted]
  • Van Hal, T. (2016). Protestant pioneers in Sanskrit studies (ca. 1700–1750): An overlooked chapter in South-Indian missionary linguistics. Historiographia Linguistica, 43 (1), 99-144. Open Access
  • Van Hal, T. (2019). “Early Modern Views on Language and Languages (ca. 1450-1800).” Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press. Available at: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.381.
  • Van Hal, T. (2019). “European traditions in India and Indonesia.” Cambridge World History of Lexicography, ed. by John Considine, 634–657. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Van Hal, T., Peetermans, A., Van Loon, Z. (2018). Presentation of the RELiCTA database: Repertory of Early Modern Linguistic and Catechetical Tools of America, Asia, and Africa. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 28 (2), 293-306.
  • Van Loon, Z. (2018). De vroegmoderne verwerving, productieprocessen en verspreiding van kennis over inheemse talen van de Nieuwe Wereld. Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 25, 123-125.
  • Van Loon, Z. (2018). Pierre-Philippe Potier’s Elementa Grammaticae Huronicae (1745). (URL)
  • Van Loon, Z. (2020). How book history can contribute to Missionary Linguistics: Exploring the sixteenth-century production and publishing of the first Quechua vocabulary and grammar printed in South America. Beitrage zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 30 (2), 165-197.
  • Van Loon, Z., Peetermans, A. (2020). Wide-Lensed Approaches to Missionary Linguistics: The Circulation of Knowledge on Amerindian Languages through Sixteenth-Century Spanish Printed Grammars. In: A.A. Bakkerus, R. Fernández Rodríguez, L. Zack, O. Zwartjes (Eds.), Missionary Linguistic Studies from Mesoamerica to Patagonia, Chapt. 3, (54-80). (Brill's Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture, 22). Leiden and Boston: Brill. ISBN: 978-90-04-42460-9. doi: 10.1163/9789004427006
  • De Vocht, L., Van Loon, Z. (contr.) (2019). Dossier Inheemse Talen. Missionarislinguïstiek in dienst van evangelisatie. Tertio, 990, 8-9.
  • Van Loon, Z., Thomas, W. (sup.), Van Hal, T. (cosup.), Behiels, G. (cosup.) (2020). Languages of Evangelization: The Early Modern Circulation of Missionary Knowledge on Indigenous Languages in New Spain, Peru, And New France.