Early Descriptors and Descriptions of South Asian Languages from the 16th Century Onwards

Abstract

An introduction to the special collection "Early Descriptors and Descriptions of South Asian Languages from the 16th Century Onwards" that develops the main ideas on which the contributions in this special edition of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics focus. The Introduction is not only a premise to the individual papers included in the volume and which are presented in the last paragraph. Emphasising the role played both by Portuguese individuals and by the Portuguese language as a metalanguage, it examines how the diffusion of Christianity in India led to the description of South Asian languages and how the grammaticisation of South Indian languages came about.

How missionaries applied Portuguese and Latin descriptive categories in the classification and explanation of verb conjugations and <i>paired</i> verbs of Tamil

“…In reality, BC was reproducing and, at the same time, extending what GA/PB included in his Arte, a grammar with which BC (or the copyist of his Arte) seems to have been well acquainted. As already discussed in Muru (2018Muru ( , 2020 and stated above (cf. § 4), BC mentions GA's Arte on several occasions in his work, at times critically.…”

Europejskie gramatyki sanskrytu XVII-XIX wiek

“…Tak więc abecadło wszechsłowiańskie Malinowskiego, jeżeli rości sobie pretensyją do skończoności i nieomylności, dla praktycznego użytku jest za "uczone", dla naukowych zaś celów zanadto ubogie, pomimo że ogólna zasada jest jak najzupełniej "naukowa"230. Polish, "Wratislaviensium Studia Classica" 2017-2018. 236 F. X. Mai inowski, Gramatyka sanskrytu porównanego z językiem sta rosłowiańskim i polskim.…”

Discoveries, missions and interlinguistic meetings of the Portuguese language in the East

“…The Portuguese language in the modern period has been studied from the perspective of the companion language of the Empire. Many of this production has been studied by prominent researchers, mostly in the two past decades, such as, v.g., Matos (1968), Buescu (1983), Suzuki (1987), Baxter (1996), Maruyama (1996Maruyama ( , 2004, Pfá nder & Ferreira (2006), Fonseca (2006), Jayasuriya (2008), Clements (2009), Ames (2009), Zwartjes (2011), Fangze (2011), Cardoso (2014, 2016, Assunçá o (2016), Fernandes & Assunçá o (2018), Muru (2018), Nakaema (2021). The approach, rooted in the famous sentence la lengua, compañera del Imperio, was introduced by the Gramática de la Lengua Castellana by Antonio de Nebrija, published in 1492.…”