Português
Since the first missionary grammars of the sixteenth century, scholars have characterized the Indigenous languages of the Americas by their defining properties – some real, others assumed – producing classificatory schemes that grouped and ranked the languages as much by structural type as by genealogy. The earliest descriptions – among them the grammar of Nahuatl by Andrés de Olmos ([1547] 2002) and, in South America, Domingo de Santo Tomás’s grammar of Quechua ([1560] 1994) – were modelled on the Latin and Spanish grammars of Antonio de Nebrija (c. 1444–1522) (Zwartjes 2012). Such characterizations frequently took the form of a negative diagnostic, defining the languages by what they were said to lack, judged against the categories of the Latin model: sounds and lexical categories familiar from European languages, and even syntax, as Horacio Carochi (1579–1662) claimed of Classical Nahuatl in his 1645 grammar. Successive schemes range from colonial hierarchies ranking languages by structural type to Joseph Greenberg’s (1987) contested continent-wide groupings.
However, missionary descriptions also yielded acute observations of unfamiliar structures, recorded with care and prompting new descriptive terminology – noun incorporation in Nahuatl, later analysed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and the combined agent-object verbal endings, or transiciones, of Quechua, Araucanian, and Aymara (Adelaar 2012: 7). From such observations emerged broader generalizations. Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760–1844) coined “polysynthesis” in 1816 for a pattern already identified by Johann Severin Vater (1810: 206), proposing, after Vater, that it extended across the entire continent (Heckewelder and Du Ponceau 1819: 430). This characterization carried ideological charges: some read morphological complexity as evidence of regularity and richness, others as proof of “primitiveness” and an incapacity for abstraction – the recurring image of American languages as “concrete”.
Bringing together specialists in the languages of North America, Mesoamerica, and South America, the session examines which structural features were taken to be diagnostic of the languages of the Americas in successive periods, how those choices reflected the methodological resources and ideological assumptions of their time, and how characterizations first formulated in the colonial period continue to shape descriptive and typological practice today.
References
Adelaar, Willem F. H. 2012. Historical overview: Descriptive and comparative research on South American Indian languages. In Lyle Campbell & Verónica Grondona (eds.), The indigenous languages of South America: A comprehensive guide, 1–57. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Carochi, Horacio. 1645. Arte de la lengva mexicana con la declaracion de los adverbios della. Mexico City: Juan Ruiz.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Heckewelder, John & Peter Stephen Du Ponceau. 1819. A correspondence between the Rev. John Heckewelder, of Bethlehem, and Peter S. Duponceau, Esq. corresponding secretary of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, respecting the languages of the American Indians. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1. 351–448.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Olmos, Andrés de. [1547] 2002. Arte de la lengua mexicana. Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla & Miguel León-Portilla (eds.). Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Santo Tomás, Domingo de. [1560] 1994. Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Peru. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica & UNESCO. [Originally published Valladolid: Francisco Fernández de Córdova.]
Vater, Johann Severin. 1810. Untersuchungen über Amerika’s Bevölkerung aus dem alten Kontinente. Leipzig: Vogel.
Zwartjes, Otto. 2012. The historiography of missionary linguistics: Present state and further research opportunities. Historiographia Linguistica 39(2/3). 185–242.
Speakers
Raul Aranovich (University of California, Davis) – “The historiography of language classification in North America: A reconsideration of methods, goals, and results”
Lucero Meléndez Guadarrama (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) – “Describing the unfamiliar: Morphological features of Tének and Yucatec Maya in eighteenth-century missionary grammars”
Fernando Orphão de Carvalho (Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) – “Facts and assumptions: Bound forms in the history of Tupi-Guarani linguistics”
Michael W. Swanton (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) – “Manuel Náxera’s challenge to Du Ponceau”
Margaret Thomas (Boston College) – “Who knew what, and why, about Ojibwa gender, 1823–1838”
Matthias Urban (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) & Université Lumière Lyon 2) and Nicholas Q. Emlen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) – “Descriptive linguistics and the Andean languages: Four and a half centuries of epistemological transformation”
However, missionary descriptions also yielded acute observations of unfamiliar structures, recorded with care and prompting new descriptive terminology – noun incorporation in Nahuatl, later analysed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and the combined agent-object verbal endings, or transiciones, of Quechua, Araucanian, and Aymara (Adelaar 2012: 7). From such observations emerged broader generalizations. Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760–1844) coined “polysynthesis” in 1816 for a pattern already identified by Johann Severin Vater (1810: 206), proposing, after Vater, that it extended across the entire continent (Heckewelder and Du Ponceau 1819: 430). This characterization carried ideological charges: some read morphological complexity as evidence of regularity and richness, others as proof of “primitiveness” and an incapacity for abstraction – the recurring image of American languages as “concrete”.
Bringing together specialists in the languages of North America, Mesoamerica, and South America, the session examines which structural features were taken to be diagnostic of the languages of the Americas in successive periods, how those choices reflected the methodological resources and ideological assumptions of their time, and how characterizations first formulated in the colonial period continue to shape descriptive and typological practice today.
References
Adelaar, Willem F. H. 2012. Historical overview: Descriptive and comparative research on South American Indian languages. In Lyle Campbell & Verónica Grondona (eds.), The indigenous languages of South America: A comprehensive guide, 1–57. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Carochi, Horacio. 1645. Arte de la lengva mexicana con la declaracion de los adverbios della. Mexico City: Juan Ruiz.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Heckewelder, John & Peter Stephen Du Ponceau. 1819. A correspondence between the Rev. John Heckewelder, of Bethlehem, and Peter S. Duponceau, Esq. corresponding secretary of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, respecting the languages of the American Indians. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1. 351–448.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Olmos, Andrés de. [1547] 2002. Arte de la lengua mexicana. Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla & Miguel León-Portilla (eds.). Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Santo Tomás, Domingo de. [1560] 1994. Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Peru. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica & UNESCO. [Originally published Valladolid: Francisco Fernández de Córdova.]
Vater, Johann Severin. 1810. Untersuchungen über Amerika’s Bevölkerung aus dem alten Kontinente. Leipzig: Vogel.
Zwartjes, Otto. 2012. The historiography of missionary linguistics: Present state and further research opportunities. Historiographia Linguistica 39(2/3). 185–242.
Speakers
Raul Aranovich (University of California, Davis) – “The historiography of language classification in North America: A reconsideration of methods, goals, and results”
Lucero Meléndez Guadarrama (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) – “Describing the unfamiliar: Morphological features of Tének and Yucatec Maya in eighteenth-century missionary grammars”
Fernando Orphão de Carvalho (Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) – “Facts and assumptions: Bound forms in the history of Tupi-Guarani linguistics”
Michael W. Swanton (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) – “Manuel Náxera’s challenge to Du Ponceau”
Margaret Thomas (Boston College) – “Who knew what, and why, about Ojibwa gender, 1823–1838”
Matthias Urban (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) & Université Lumière Lyon 2) and Nicholas Q. Emlen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) – “Descriptive linguistics and the Andean languages: Four and a half centuries of epistemological transformation”