Grammars of Colonialism

Gilmour, Rachael

doi:10.1057/9780230286856

Cited by 34 publications

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“…Certain languages were singled out for particular praise -such as Xhosa, considered 'copious ', 'regular', 'philosophical' and 'euphonious' -and propagated and promoted by Christian missionaries. 15 David Livingstone made similar observations about Tswana, writing that…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth‐Century South Africa

Gilmour

2007

History Compass

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Throughout the nineteenth century, driven by the need both to communicate with potential African converts and to produce written Scriptural translations, Christian missionaries set about studying, transliterating and transforming South African languages. Their work served, in various ways, the demands of the developing British colonial order; established new ‘standard forms’ of South African vernaculars; and facilitated the development of literacy among African people in the region. The close relationship between missionaries, colonialism and language study in South Africa has been documented and analysed by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. This article summarizes some of the key issues in the field, as they have defined critical debates since the 1980s, by focusing on models of ‘invention’ on the one hand and ‘reciprocity’ on the other, and exploring continuities and dissonances between these debates and the wider fields of colonial studies and colonial discourse analysis. It concludes by arguing for a balance. On the one hand, it is vital that we acknowledge the significance of missionary language study as a mode of colonial discourse with the power to shape the social, linguistic, and political realities it purported only to describe. On the other, this should not eclipse our understanding of missionary linguistic work in social context, as the product of fraught, complex, and often mutually transformative encounters between European missionaries and African speakers of the languages in question.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth‐Century South Africa

Gilmour

2007

History Compass

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“…70 Trained in classical philology at Bohn and Berlin, Rachael Gilmour has argued that Bleek was also the first to systematically apply the methodologies of classical philology as they had developed in Indo-European language study to the study of African languages, a methodology which 'conceived of [language] as a universal human phenomenon rooted in a regular and uniform developmental process'. 71 Furthermore, Bleek's philology was a product of the post-Darwinian turn in the natural and human sciences, and his classificatory schema for Indigenous languages differed from those developed by an earlier generation of pre-1860 comparative philologists 'in its explicitly evolutionary suppositions'. 72 The philological catalogues of Grey's collection that Bleek compiled were a pioneering attempt to apply evolutionary theory directly to the ethnographic study of the languages of the Indigenous peoples of southern Africa.…”

Section: 'Knowing the Native Mind': Collecting And Classifying Indigementioning

confidence: 99%

“…71 Furthermore, Bleek's philology was a product of the post-Darwinian turn in the natural and human sciences, and his classificatory schema for Indigenous languages differed from those developed by an earlier generation of pre-1860 comparative philologists 'in its explicitly evolutionary suppositions'. 72 The philological catalogues of Grey's collection that Bleek compiled were a pioneering attempt to apply evolutionary theory directly to the ethnographic study of the languages of the Indigenous peoples of southern Africa.…”

Section: 'Knowing the Native Mind': Collecting And Classifying Indigementioning

confidence: 99%

“…By arguing that both Xhosa 'Kaffir' and San 'Bushman' languages were the most 'primitive forms' of the 'prefix-pronominal' and 'suffix-pronominal' language groups, Bleek's comparative philological project was deeply imbricated with contemporary anthropology and became highly influential in shaping European racial taxonomies. 73 That Bleek intended his South Africa catalogue to constitute a major intervention in the field of comparative philology is evident from the extensive philological and ethnographic descriptions that precede the lists of works. These 'brief and lucid sketches' were described by an early reviewer in the Cape Monthly Magazine (est.…”

Section: 'Knowing the Native Mind': Collecting And Classifying Indigementioning

confidence: 99%

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Knowing the ‘Native Mind’: Ethnological and Philological Collections

Atkin

Comyn

Fermanis

et al. 2019

New Directions in Book History

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This chapter examines the role that the major research libraries of the southern colonies played in the collection, classification, and transmission of ethnological and philological knowledge about Indigenous populations. It argues that the transnational scientific networks, useful knowledge societies, and periodicals cultivated by public libraries enabled colonial cities such as Melbourne, Singapore, and Cape Town to become regional centres of scientific knowledge creation as well as collection, influencing both British governmental policy and broader cultural attitudes amongst Europeans towards the Indigenous peoples of the expanding British Empire.

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Reference Guide for Varieties of English

Hickey¹

2013

A Dictionary of Varieties of English

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Grammars of Colonialism

Cited by 34 publications

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Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth‐Century South Africa

Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth‐Century South Africa

Knowing the ‘Native Mind’: Ethnological and Philological Collections

Reference Guide for Varieties of English

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