The first 'Kolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Romanistik' (Trier 1975) was held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance philology. The colloquium offered Romanists and historians of linguistics the opportunity for intense discussion, which is continued in the papers in this volume.

This ambitious and ground-breaking book examines the linguistic studies produced by missionaries based on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America (and particularly Haida Gwaii) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of unpublished archival materials, the author demonstrates that the missionaries were responsible for introducing many innovative and insightful grammatical analyses. Rather than merely adopting Graeco-Roman models, they drew extensively upon studies of non-European languages, and a careful exploration of their scripture translations reveal the origins of the Haida sociolect that emerged as a result of the missionary activity. The complex interactions between the missionaries and anthropologists are also discussed, and it is shown that the former sometimes anticipated linguistic analyses that are now incorrectly attributed to the latter. Since this book draws upon recent work in theoretical linguistics, religious history, translation studies, and anthropology, it emphasises the unavoidably interdisciplinary nature of Missionary Linguistics research.

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 Mérida, Yucatán (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- and interculturality, semantics, morphological analysis and organizational principles of the dictionaries, such as styles and structure of the entries, citation forms, etc. It presents research into languages such as Maya, Nahuatl, Tarasco (Pur’épecha), Lushootseed, Equatorian Quechua, Tupinambá, Ilocan, Tamil and Southern Min Chinese dialects.

Anthropology and linguistics, as historically developing disciplines, have had partly separate roots and traditions. In particular settings and in general, the two disciplines have partly shared, partly differed in the nature of their materials, their favorite types of problem the personalities of their dominant figures, their relations with other disciplines and intellectual current. The two disciplines have also varied in their interrelation with each other and the society about them. Institutional arrangements have reflected the varying degrees of kinship, kithship, and separation. Such relationships themselves form a topic that is central to a history of linguistic anthropology yet marginal to a self-contained history of linguistics or anthropology as either would be conceived by most authors. There exists not only a subject matter for a history of linguistic anthropology, but also a definite need.

This volume provides an analysis of a famous medieval Arabic grammatical text, al-Ājurrūmiya (c. 1300), as commented on by as-Shirbini (d. 1570). This edition includes the original text and a translation into English, as well as extensive comments and annotations, with the aim of making accessible both to Arabists and non-Arabists the main elements of indigenous Arabic linguistics, and thereby at least partially filling a large blank in the history of linguistics.

The papers brought together in the present volume represent the essence of the author’s reflections on issues concerning linguistic historiography and of particular investigations in 19th and 20th century linguistic thought. The papers are clustered in three sections: I. Towards a Historiography of Linguistics, II. Appraisals of Individual Scholars, and III. Trends and Traditions in Linguistics.

The aim of this book is to provide a concise historical survey of linguistic investigation relating to the notion of morphophonemics. The study is essentially historical and thus does not offer its own theory of morphophonemics. Since attention is focused on the development of morphophonemic theory, contemporary work in this area is not of central concern. But the study was undertaken in the hope that a better understanding of earlier work would help to clarify present-day issues.