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Published 2011.
Missionary grammars were practical tools for learning and teaching languages. The comments and observations made by the authors were interspersed or linked to the more traditional Latin-based paradigms with respect to declensions and the ...
Published 2011.
Missionary grammars were practical tools for learning and teaching languages. The comments and observations made by the authors were interspersed or linked to the more traditional Latin-based paradigms with respect to declensions and the conjugations of nouns and verbs. However, the missionaries often paid a great deal of attention to the exotic features of the languages they studied, and if they recognised any of comparable features in the other languages they were familiar with, they noted this down.
This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. The aim is to provide an integrated framework, analysis and evaluation of missionary grammars written in Portuguese. An interesting corpus of documented languages in the pre-modern period (16th - 18th century) is still extant, mainly Asian grammars of Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; Kipe?, Tupinamb? in Brazil; the African languages Kimbundu, as spoken in Angola and Brazil, and Sena, (Mozambique).
Each section opens with the historical background of each text, and followed by sections devoted to linguistics, starting with orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and finally syntax. Whenever available, information is given of the pedagogical features, language variation, pragmatics and the missionaries' attitudes towards them.
