Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550-1800
Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550-1800

Author: Otto Zwartjes

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2011-11-23

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 9027283257

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description, analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them, these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia, Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil, Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora, Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context, and its linguistic context is analyzed, with particular attention to orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and syntax. Whenever possible, pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed, together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics, and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

Bantu
Bantu

Author: Clement M. Doke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-20

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1351601555

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Originally published in 1945, this volume represented the first to classify Bantu languages. This volume does not record all the dialects but makes reference to those in which some grammatical study has been done and classifies them according to mainly geographical zones. Owing to tribal migrations, individual members of a particular zone may be living among members of a different zone (as has been the case with the Ngoni, South-Eastern Zone, who are found among the Eastern Bantu), but the zone label is taken from the habitat of the majority.

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language
A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Author: John M. Lipski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-03-10

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1107320372

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The African slave trade, beginning in the fifteenth century, brought African languages into contact with Spanish and Portuguese, resulting in the Africans' gradual acquisition of these languages. In this 2004 book, John Lipski describes the major forms of Afro-Hispanic language found in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America over the last 500 years. As well as discussing pronunciation, morphology and syntax, he separates legitimate forms of Afro-Hispanic expression from those that result from racist stereotyping, to assess how contact with the African diaspora has had a permanent impact on contemporary Spanish. A principal issue is the possibility that Spanish, in contact with speakers of African languages, may have creolized and restructured - in the Caribbean and perhaps elsewhere - permanently affecting regional and social varieties of Spanish today. The book is accompanied by the largest known anthology of primary Afro-Hispanic texts from Iberia, Latin America, and former Afro-Hispanic contacts in Africa and Asia.