[Lingtyp] earliest attestations of interlinear examples per area/continent

[Siva Kalyan]

The earliest instance of this “superscript” style of glossing that I know of comes from this 17th-century Latin translation of the Confucian classics: https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Confucius_sinarum_philosophus_sive_scien/BerpG7rz0_YC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA1-PA1&printsec=frontcover&dq=sermones. Here, the words/phrases in the Latin translation are marked with superscripts corresponding to the order of characters in the original text (which is not provided).

The practice of using superscript numbers to indicate a different word order is even older than this; I remember a (monolingual) Renaissance edition of Phaedrus’s Fables that uses superscripts to help the reader “unscramble” the poetic syntax of the original. This isn’t glossing, though.

Siva

> On 8 Jul 2025, at 12:02 pm, David Nash via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
> 
> On 8/7/2025 00:23, Sebastian Nordhoff via Lingtyp wrote:
>> For instance, for Australia, we have both word-to-word as well as sentence-to-sentence translations in Meyer (1843), see https://paperhive.org/documents/items/DoB16j3955xu?a=p:298
> What has to be the earliest instance of word-by-word glossing of an Australian language is William Dawes' from 1790. He used superscript numbers. The first occurrence in his extant notebooks is
> Yenma1 kaóui2 Walk1 come2, or in plain English come here or walk this way.
> https://www.williamdawes.org/ms/msview.php?image-id=book-a-page-6
> There are subsequent examples of Dawes using four or more superscripts.
> David
> https://www0.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/
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