Johan Ludwig Krapf (1810 81), a German-born member of the Church Missionary Society in East Africa, is regarded as the founder of Swahili studies in Europe. Having pursued an interest in Oriental culture from an early age, he first went to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a missionary. During his travels in Africa, he became the first European to see Mount Kenya; but he also considered the potential of Swahili as a lingua franca. Krapf published the first printed text in Swahili, and the first systematic Swahili grammar, as well as being the first to bring Swahili manuscripts to Europe. Another in a...

An 1874 survey of the diverse languages of India, presenting vocabulary in a tabular system which reveals similarities and differences.

Born in Ireland, William Marsden (1754 1836) was a pioneer in the study of oriental languages, in particular those of modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia. At the age of seventeen he joined his elder brother to work for the East India Company in Sumatra, and began researching the languages of the East Indies. He moved to London in 1779 and became associated with its scientific and academic circles, attending meetings of the Royal Society and becoming a friend of Sir Joseph Banks. This gave him access to vocabularies compiled by naval officers, and these, combined with his own observations,...

John William Colenso (1814 83) was appointed the first Bishop of Natal in 1853 and settled there in 1855. He devoted great energy to developing the diocese, overseeing the completion of the cathedral in Pietermaritzburg, the building of churches in Durban and Richmond and the establishment of mission stations. He also learned Zulu and set up a printing press. He published a Zulu grammar in 1855, within months of his arrival, and translated the New Testament into Zulu. This substantial Zulu English dictionary appeared in 1861, with financial support from the colonial legislature. It contains...

'Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish?' asked Henry Jenner (1848 1934) in the preface to this 1904 publication, dating from the beginnings of the Cornish revival. Jenner admits that 'the reason ... is sentimental and not in the least practical'. Born in Cornwall, but raised in south-east England, Jenner worked at the British Museum from 1870 to 1909 and was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He eventually retired to Cornwall where he became a leading figure in establishing the Old Cornwall Societies and the Gorseth Kernow. The Handbook begins by marshalling the evidence for the...

In this 1901 work, Berthold Delbruck (1842 1922), who is famous for his contribution to the study of the syntax in Indo-European languages, focuses on Wilhelm Wundt's understanding of speech. Wundt (1832 1920), often referred to as the 'father of experimental psychology', held that language was one of the most important aspects of mental processing. In order to account for Wundt's theories on the nature of the soul, and his belief that emotion and perception are acts of experience rather than objects, Delbruck compares Wundt's theories with those of psychologist and educationalist J. F....

In this fourth part of his general work on syntax, published in 1879, Berthold Delbruck (1842 1922), the German scholar remembered for his contribution to the study of the syntax in Indo-European languages (his three-volume Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen is also reissued in this series), concentrates on the syntax of ancient Greek. His focus is deliberately broad as he seeks to engage classicists who are interested in linguistics or in how the Greek language was actually used, rather than in highly specialised case studies. In twelve chapters, Delbruck guides the reader...

The Indo-Aryan language family is a branch of the Indo-European phylum, and includes Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Gujarati. First published in 1872, this three-volume comparative grammar of the family was written by the British civil servant John Beames (1837 1902). From 1866 he spent twelve years in India, during which he gathered data for what he intended to be the first comprehensive and accurate Indo-Aryan grammar. Volume 1 focuses on phonetics and phonology. Drawing on evidence from Indo-Aryan sound systems, it shows Sanskrit to be the languages' parent, while exploring...

The American philologist David Simon Blondheim (1884 1934) was endowed with vast Hebraic learning. In this book, first published in 1925, he makes connections between European Jewish speech in antiquity, the Old Latin versions of the Bible, and medieval Romance languages. He examines how Greek-speaking Jews transmitted their linguistic traditions both orally and in writing until the Middle Ages. Establishing that they used the Hebrew and Greek Bibles side by side and translated the Greek version into Old Latin, Blondheim concludes that their traditional translations extensively influenced the...

Born in Germany and trained in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Friedrich Max Muller (1823 1900) settled at Oxford, where he would become the university's first professor of comparative philology. Best known for his work on the Rig Veda, he brought the comparative study of language, mythology and religion to a wider audience in Victorian Britain. His lectures at the Royal Institution, published in two volumes between 1861 and 1864, were reprinted fifteen times before the end of the century. Volume 1 contains the nine 1861 lectures, in which Max Muller aligns the science of language with the...