From the 16th century onwards, Europeans encountered languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts, they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document, and all of them witness their authors attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar, to accommodate...

This fourth volume on Missionary Linguistics focuses on lexicography. It contains a selection of papers derived from the Fifth International Conference on Missionary Linguistics held in Merida, Yucatan (Mexico), 14th 17th March 2007. As with the previous three volumes (2004, on general issues, 2005, on orthography and phonology, and 2007 on morphology and syntax), this volume looks at the lexicographical production of missionaries in general, the influence of European sources, such as Ambrogio Calepino and Antonio de Nebrija, translation theories, attitudes toward non-Western cultures, trans-...

The object of this volume is the study of missionary translation practices which occur within a colonial context of political domination and spiritual conquest. Missionary translation becomes especially manifest in bilingual ethnographic descriptions, in (bilingual) catechisms and in the missionaries lexicographic condensation of bilingual dictionaries. The study of these instances permits the analysis and interpretation of their guiding principles, their translation practice and underlying reasoning. It also permits the modern linguist to discern semantic changes that can be revealed in...