Second International Conference on (Missionary-) Colonial Linguistics (1492-1850): São Paulo, Brasil, March 10-13th, 2004

[Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg]

                             INFOLING
 Lista de distribución de lingüística del español (ISSN: 1576-3404)
                  http://elies.rediris.es/infoling/
    Envío de información: infoling-request at listserv.rediris.es
                             EDITORES:
       Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg, UAB <carlos.subirats at uab.es>
           Mar Cruz Piñol, U. Barcelona <mcruz at ub.edu>
        Eulalia de Bobes Soler, UAB <Eulalia.deBobes at uab.es>
 Equipo de edición: http://elies.rediris.es/infoling/editores.html
  "Estudios de Lingüística del Español": http://elies.rediris.es
es una red temática de lingüística del español asociada a Infoling.

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      Second International Conference on (Missionary-) Colonial
      Linguistics (1492-1850)
             São Paulo, Brasil, March 10-13th, 2004
(Entre otros temas, esta Congreso está interesado en las gramáticas
escritas por misioneros en diferentes lenguas, entre ellas el español).
   http://www.ub.uio.no/uhs/sok/fag/RomSpr/mislingbrasil/index.html
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                       General Information

    After the discovery of the New World, the Europeans began to
establish their hegemony in a new continent. European expansion,
colonization and 'christianization' of a large number and variety of
Amerindian tribes was accompanied by the study and recording of the
native languages of the Americas. In the same period, Christian
missionary activities escalated in Asia, especially in the Far East,
in Russia and a little later in Africa. In the early 19th century, the
Pacific became a new 'America' for missionary linguistics.

    The central purpose of this seminar is to outline a comprehensive
study, to be eventually published, of what is generally referred to as
'missionary linguistics'. The subjects are to some extent limited in
time (focusing primarily on the period 1492-1850) but not in space. We
aim at putting together grammars written in different languages
(Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, etc.), by
missionaries of different orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits,
etc.), and in different continents. The descriptive model of
missionary grammars is based on traditional Latin school grammars. The
languages were 'reduced' to this framework, which meant that
missionaries usually 'imposed' the structure of Latin on these
typologically different languages. Over the last decades, research
made evident that missionaries were perfectly aware of the fact that
the Latin based-metalanguage was not (completely) - or absolutely not
- in agreement with the linguistic facts themselves. This resulted in
many original approaches to linguistic phenomena. In this sense, the
application of the Latin grammar pattern would not have caused more
problems to the missionary grammarians than our modern models or
theories may have been causing to us.

    In fact, if one of the tasks of linguistic historiography is to
lay bare the (sometimes unconscious) assumptions that the linguists
brought to bear on their practices and their consequences for the
improvement of our linguistic knowledge along history, the
investigation of the conditions under which the first codifications
and gramaticalization of these non-European languages were realised
and presented, is an important step forwards in the history of
linguistics and the study of the grammatical tradition of the European
vernaculars during the Renaissance can benefit from the study of
missionary grammars.

                            Más información:

    http://www.ub.uio.no/uhs/sok/fag/RomSpr/mislingbrasil/index.html

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