Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa, and Brazil, 1550–1800 by Otto Zwartjes (review)

Otto Zwartjes views this monograph, in part, as a necessary corrective to scholarly neglect that has left the surviving pioneering missionary grammars of non-European languages to languish in obscurity. In particular, he notes a dismissive attitude toward the idea that these grammars might have a role to play in the historiography of European linguistic scholarship and pedagogy as these came to grapple with language structures hitherto entirely beyond their ken.

As a consequence of the Age of Discovery, traditional European philology encountered new worlds of language, particularly through religious proselytizing in far-flung regions. Catholic missionaries whose linguistic formation was limited to contemporary and classical European languages and, to a lesser degree, Hebrew and Arabic, were confronted with making sense of and making sense in languages that were seemingly beyond the reach of their preconceived universal model of human language, that is, one conforming to the familiar structures of Classical Greek and Latin.

Chapter 1, the introduction, is divided into six sections: “Goal of the Study,” “The Historiographical Neglect of Missionary Linguistics,” “The Contribution of Missionary Linguistics to the Study of the Typology of Languages,” “Missionary Linguists as Field-Workers: Their Attitudes,” “The Description of Exotic Languages and the Development of Linguistic Concepts,” and “The Goals and Structure of the Study.” This last section discusses issues relating to phonology and orthography, morphosyntax, the lexicon, and extragrammatical information. Zwartjes points out (p. 9) that the grammars that he examines were not intended as descriptive or theoretical works per se; rather, they were didactic or pedagogical works designed with the practical goal of assisting fellow missionaries to acquire the language skills needed to preach, hear confessions, and otherwise communicate their version of the Christian message to the speakers of unfamiliar languages in what to Europeans were alien cultural contexts. This goal should be borne in mind when evaluating the significance of these works for the historiography of linguistics.

Subsequent chapters deal with Portuguese missionary contacts with the languages of the world regions mentioned in the book’s title. A chapter on the Semitic languages Arabic and Hebrew is included for their contribution to the awakening of academic and commercial interests beyond earlier Eurocentric linguistic frontiers.

Chapter 2 deals with the Indian Subcontinent. After some historical background and a brief overview of the Indian grammatical traditions, the rest of the chapter discusses grammars of five languages of the subcontinent. The only Dravidian language covered (the remainder are Indo-Aryan) is Tamil, the subject of an anonymous grammar attributed to Henrique Henriques (or Anrique Anriquez, 1520–1600). Relevant data regarding his life and work are presented, followed by an analysis of the authorship and sources of his Tamil grammar. It is noted that the name used for the language, “Malabar,” was also applied to the Indo-Aryan language Marathi. Zwartjes then turns to discussion of the structure of the grammar, Tamil orthography and phonology, nominal declension, the verb, and explicit comparisons made between Tamil and Portuguese. Also discussed are Henriques’s treatment of Tamil word order, agreement, and linguistic variation. Finally, Henriques’s metalanguage and the reputation of his work are examined, and his grammar is compared with other grammars of Tamil. This range of topics is typical throughout the book, though with varying degrees of explicitness and differences in the order of presentation.

The other grammars of Indian languages discussed are the grammar of Konkani by Thomas Stephens (Thomaz Estevão, 1549–1619; although he was an English Jesuit, his grammar was composed in Portuguese), the grammar of Bengali by Manoel da Assumpçam (1743), and anonymous grammars of Marathi and Hindi (both 1778). The Konkani, Marathi, and Hindi grammars devote some attention to ergativity, describing with reasonable accuracy their split ergative patterns in which a past, perfect, or perfective verb agrees with the object, while its subject (at least in Konkani and Hindi) takes an ergative case...