Robert Brough Smyth (1830 1889) was a successful Melbourne-based mining engineer and civil servant who spent 16 years as Secretary of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines. In this study of the society and customs of indigenous Australians in the Victoria region, first published in 1878, he combines his own observations with those of others who lived or worked closely with the Aboriginal population. The principal focus of volume 2 is language. Smyth discusses the similarities and differences between regional dialects, grammatical rules and the use of sign language, and the...

Robert Brough Smyth (1830 1889) was a successful Melbourne-based mining engineer and civil servant whose international contacts included the geologist Adam Sedgwick. He also spent 16 years as Secretary of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines. In this study of the society and customs of indigenous Australians in the Victoria region, first published in 1878, he combines his own observations with those of others who lived or worked closely with the Aboriginal population. Volume 1 discusses the Aborigines' physical and mental characteristics, demographics, social interaction, rituals,...

The famous scholar of Indo-European syntax Berthold Delbruck (1842 1922) published this study of Sanskrit syntax in 1888. It focuses on the stage of the language that was termed 'Vedic' by the Indian grammarian Panini (c. 400 BCE). Delbruck's intention was to describe that material as clearly and thoroughly as possible in order to facilitate future comparative or in-depth studies. The book begins with chapters devoted to basic sentence structure and word order, before moving on to number, gender, case, declension of nouns, and then adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and verbs with their tenses,...

C. H. Armbruster (1874 1957) was a civil servant in the Anglo-Sudan government and a linguist specialising in African languages. After visiting Ethiopia on diplomatic missions in 1906 and 1907 Armbruster published this three-volume reference work on colloquial, spoken Amharic between 1908 and 1920. Armbruster's study of Amharic was one of the first to be written in English, and exemplifies the shift among linguists away from the formal, classics-based style of earlier reference grammars towards a focus on colloquial speech and communication. His examples are drawn from direct knowledge of the...