Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Library Collection - Linguistics

In this 1925 work, philologist D. S. Blondheim (1884-1934) proves that from antiquity to the Middle Ages Jews translated the Greek Bible into Old Latin. He thereby sheds light on the influence of Jewish speech on the Vulgate, the English Bible and the Romance languages.

Amassed over a forty-year career, first with the East India Company in Sumatra and later with the Admiralty as its First Secretary, William Marsden's library, as revealed in this catalogue of 1827, was an invaluable collection. An expert in Asian languages, Marsden (1754-1836) published his catalogue to provide a basis for study into comparative linguistics and oriental literature. This work provides an insight into both the practice of book-collecting in the period, and the variety of works published throughout the world. It lists texts on travel, medicine and linguistics, as well as works of literature and religion, including some extremely rare Bibles, and a possibly unique copy of the Book of Genesis in the Algonquin language. The library itself was donated to King's College, London, in 1835 and is now shared by King's College and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

John William Colenso (1814-83) was appointed the first Bishop of Natal in 1853 and settled there in 1855. He devoted great energy to developing the diocese, overseeing the completion of the cathedral in Pietermaritzburg, the building of churches in Durban and Richmond and the establishment of mission stations. He also learned Zulu and set up a printing press. He published a Zulu grammar in 1855, within months of his arrival, and translated the New Testament into Zulu. This substantial Zulu-English dictionary appeared in 1861, with financial support from the colonial legislature. It contains over 10,000 entries, many with examples of usage, and includes loan words from European languages. The Preface provides brief notes on phonology, and explains Colenso's orthographic principles, criteria for selection, and the structure of the entries. The dictionary remained a standard work even after Colenso's death, and a fourth revised edition was published in 1905.

In this 1901 work, Berthold Delbruck (1842-1922), who is famous for his contribution to the study of the syntax in Indo-European languages, focuses on Wilhelm Wundt's understanding of speech. Wundt (1832-1920), often referred to as the 'father of experimental psychology', held that language was one of the most important aspects of mental processing. In order to account for Wundt's theories on the nature of the soul, and his belief that emotion and perception are acts of experience rather than objects, Delbruck compares Wundt's theories with those of psychologist and educationalist J. F. Herbart (1776-1841). Delbruck also pays attention to the explanation of such topics as the hand gestures used by actors (and the people of Naples), the sentence structure of the German language, and onomatopoeia, though he emphasises that he has not addressed those elements in Wundt's works which are founded in psychology rather than in grammar.

Published in 1874, this groundbreaking monograph on the palaeography of southern India gained great scholarly acclaim. Arthur Coke Burnell (1840-82) served in the Indian Civil Service and as a judge, also building up a large collection of original or copied Sanskrit manuscripts. Originally intended as an introduction to his vast and pioneering Classified Index to the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Palace at Tanjore (1880), this work won Burnell an honorary doctorate at the University of Strasbourg. Replete with documentary evidence, it contains copies and explanations of numerous texts, the decipherment of which threw new light upon an obscure chapter in the history of writing, offering new theories for dating the introduction of writing into India and the origin of southern Indian alphabets and numerals. Although Burnell's work has since been built on and sometimes superseded, this is still a much-cited resource in South Asian palaeography and epigraphy.

This 1874 work by Sir George Campbell, a British government official whose Scheme for the Government of India is also reissued in this series, presents a survey of the diverse languages of India, using material obtained usually by British army officers trained by Campbell to collect 'specimens' in the course of their normal work. The tabular material is presented with the English words or phrases in one column and their equivalent in the Indian language under discussion in another: most of the languages are represented by more than one dialect, such as the 'Punjabee of Lahore' and the 'Punjabee of Mooltan'. In his introduction to the work, Campbell emphasises that the survey is not scientific, and his main conclusion is that in addition to the broad division of Aryan and Dravidian language types, India contains a huge number of 'aboriginal' languages which will require further study.

Charles Henry Robinson (1861-1925) was a Cambridge scholar who, during the 1890s, published several books on the language, literature and culture of the Hausa people. Hausa is an African language originating in Niger and northern Nigeria and spoken widely in West and Central Africa as a lingua franca. Published in 1897, Robinson's Grammar was written to serve the needs of missionaries, colonial staff and army officers who wished to communicate with the local people, but made no claim to be definitive or comprehensive. Until the twentieth century Hausa was written in an Arabic script, examples of which are given, while the exercise sections of the grammar are transliterated for students unfamiliar with Arabic. The vocabulary, mainly relating to agriculture, trade and domestic life, was chosen to suit the practical needs of Robinson's intended audience, and reveals much about colonial life in West Africa as well as providing linguistic information.

While working for the East India Company in Bengal, Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) became one of first Europeans to master the Sanskrit language. He proceeded to set up a printing press in Calcutta to publish works in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. Wilkins also undertook further related projects, including this work, published in London in 1808, which was part of his larger scheme to write a dictionary of the language and to translate a great epic poem, the Mahabharata. The grammar was the only part of the project that was completed. He never finished the dictionary, and only translated about one-third of the poem, though the part he worked on, the Bhagavad-Gita, became famous. The grammar attempts a comprehensive explanation of the language, ranging from the Devanagari alphabet to indeclinable words, and it was a vital resource in making Indian languages accessible to an English-speaking public.

Archibald Henry Sayce (1845-1933) became interested in Middle Eastern languages and scripts while still a teenager. Old Persian and Akkadian cuneiform had recently been deciphered, and popular enthusiasm for these discoveries was running high when Sayce began his academic career at Oxford in 1869. He had already published two grammars of Assyrian (both reissued in this series) by the time these lively and engaging lectures, given in 1875 and 1876, were published in 1877. The introduction expresses optimism that Assyrian and Egyptian would establish themselves as core components of the university curriculum alongside Greek and Hebrew. Acknowledging the 'repellent difficulties' of learning the Assyrian syllabary, Sayce devotes three lectures to discussing the building blocks of this ancient mode of writing. He then addresses the phonology, pronouns, verbs and syntax of the language. The last of his nine lectures considers the place of Assyrian within the Semitic language family.

The English polymath Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) wrote on a wide range of scientific, theological and pedagogical subjects. In 1761, he produced the influential textbook Rudiments of English Grammar (also reissued in this series). The following year, having taken up a teaching position at Warrington Academy, he released this outline of nineteen lectures on a variety of linguistic topics. Although it was not published, it was distributed to other dissenting academies. Intended to give teachers a starting point when discussing 'the art of language' in its diverse forms, the lectures range from articulation and the alphabet to comparative linguistics, syntax, metre and the evolution of language. Along with its companion work, it established Priestley as one of the leading grammarians and educators of his time. Modern readers will gain a deeper understanding of his drive to increase and share knowledge of how and why speech and writing served their purpose.

William Dwight Whitney (1827-94) was the foremost American philologist and Sanskrit scholar of the nineteenth century. After studying in Germany, then at the forefront of linguistic scholarship, he assumed the chair of Sanskrit at Yale in 1854, with comparative philology added to his professorship in 1869. As well as teaching modern languages, Whitney published over 300 scholarly papers and books, acted as chief editor of the ten-volume Century Dictionary, and co-founded the American Philological Association. This 1867 work is an expanded version of lectures he had given at the Smithsonian Institution and in Boston, rewritten for a wider audience and emphasising the importance of recent German philological scholarship. The first five lectures concentrate mostly on the English language and the study of languages in general, including discussion of regional dialects and American English. The lectures then go on to look at the Indo-European language family as well as methods of linguistic research.

The eminent French philologist Michel Breal (1832-1915) made significant contributions to the fields of comparative linguistics, pedagogy and etymology. He became a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1875 and a commander of the Legion d'honneur in 1890. This work, first published in 1877, gathers together articles that Breal mostly wrote before 1869, when he was appointed secretary of the new and prestigious Societe de Linguistique de Paris. He argues that language and mythology have a common origin, which accounts for why most abstract nouns are feminine, in remembrance of ancient deities. Breal also exposes new ways to study languages and their impact in primary and secondary education. Lastly, he lays the foundations of modern semantics, a discipline he intended would reconcile historical linguistics with the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Best remembered for his contribution to the study of Greek music and metre, the German classical philologist Rudolf Westphal (1826-92) had originally studied theology at the University of Marburg before turning his attention to comparative linguistics. He learnt Sanskrit and Arabic and took a keen interest in the Indo-Germanic (Indo-European) languages as well as Semitic grammar. In the late 1850s and early 1860s he joined his friend and fellow classical philologist August Rossbach (1823-98) at the University of Breslau (Wroclaw) and later taught at Moscow's Imperial Lyceum. In this work, first published in 1873, Westphal provides the reader with an overview of the Indo-European languages and their sounds. He then gives an extensive account of Indo-European verbs by focusing on the roots derived from Latin and Sanskrit.

Among the most influential figures in the development of modern linguistics, the American scholar Edward Sapir (1884-1939) notably promoted the connection between anthropology and the study of language. His name is also associated with that of his student in the Sapir-Whorf principle of linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that the structure of a language affects how its speakers conceptualise the world. In this seminal work, first published in 1921, Sapir lucidly introduces his ideas about language and explores topics that remain fundamental to linguistics today, such as the relationship between language and culture, the elements of speech, grammatical processes and concepts, historical language development, and the question of how languages influence one another. Especially significant in the history of structural linguistics and ethnolinguistics, this clearly written text remains relevant and accessible to students and scholars across the social sciences.

Thomas Grahame Bailey (1872-1942) had the components of this work printed in individual parts in India between 1902 and 1906. The Royal Asiatic Society in London decided to collect and publish them in 1908 in its monograph series, incorporating a preface by Bailey. The pagination is not continuous as already printed sheets of the earlier studies were reused. Twenty-six dialects from the hill regions of the northern and north-western Himalayas are covered in some detail, including grammar, vocabulary, their relationship to each other, and some songs. Bailey's work was pioneering: he had travelled among the hill peoples, being initiated into tribal rites and secret vocabularies, often of a criminal nature. There had been no previous publications on the grammar or philology of these dialects, merely some translated Christian texts. Bailey subsequently published a number of works on languages of the Indian subcontinent, including a history of Urdu literature.

Born in Germany and trained in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) settled at Oxford, where he would become the university's first professor of comparative philology. Best known for his work on the Rig Veda, he brought the comparative study of language, mythology and religion to a wider audience in Victorian Britain. His lectures at the Royal Institution, published in two volumes between 1861 and 1864, were reprinted fifteen times before the end of the century. Volume 2 contains the twelve 1863 lectures, in which Max Muller argues for the inseparability of the science of language from the science of the mind. He explores 'the body or the outside of language, the sounds in which language is clothed' as well as 'the soul or the inside' and its relation to mythology. Hugely successful at the time - George Eliot was particularly enthused - the lectures remain instructive reading in the history of linguistics.

Born in Germany and trained in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) settled at Oxford, where he would become the university's first professor of comparative philology. Best known for his work on the Rig Veda, he brought the comparative study of language, mythology and religion to a wider audience in Victorian Britain. His lectures at the Royal Institution, published in two volumes between 1861 and 1864, were reprinted fifteen times before the end of the century. Volume 1 contains the nine 1861 lectures, in which Max Muller aligns the science of language with the physical sciences, breaking his subject down into the three stages that he argues mark the history of any branch of human knowledge: the empirical, the classificatory and the theoretical. Hugely successful at the time - George Eliot was particularly enthused - the lectures remain instructive reading in the history of linguistics.

The German linguists Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901) and Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927) sought to answer many questions relating to the development of Indo-European languages, which are all believed to be descended from a single common ancestor. Schmidt's Verwantschaftsverhaltnisse was originally published in 1872 and Schuchardt's Uber die Lautgesetze followed in 1885; here they are reissued together in one volume. Schmidt's work developed the 'wave model' of language change, to which Schuchardt also subscribed. According to this theory, linguistic innovations spread outwards concentrically like waves, which become progressively weaker as time elapses and the distance from their point of origin increases. Since later changes may not cover the same area, there may be no sharp boundaries between neighbouring languages or dialects. This theory stood in opposition to the tree model and the doctrine of sound laws propounded by the Neogrammarian school of linguists, which is roundly critiqued in Schuchardt's contribution.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the founder of structuralist linguistics and pioneer of semiotics, began his career as a scholar of Indo-European languages (his early study of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system is also reissued in this series: ISBN 9781108006590). In 1880, Saussure was awarded a doctorate from the University of Leipzig for this study, which appeared in print in 1881. He published almost nothing more during his lifetime. Earlier Indo-Europeanists had noted the almost complete absence of the genitive absolute from Classical Sanskrit texts. Saussure argued that it must have been a feature of colloquial speech, as it appears in formulaic expressions in less 'purist' Sanskrit texts, as well as in Pali. He analyses different forms of the construction, and lists nearly 500 examples, many from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The thesis is also of interest as it reveals Saussure's early approach to problems of syntax.

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), of Huguenot stock, trained as a physician in Edinburgh and London, yet he was increasingly drawn to the sciences, corresponding with Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy. He practised medicine (free of charge) in London at the Northern Dispensary, which he co-founded, and lectured on physiology and medical topics. His Bridgewater Treatise, on animal and vegetable physiology, is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. Roget is remembered today for the present work, first published in 1852 following his retirement from professional duties. As the preface makes clear, he had contemplated such a work for nearly fifty years. It supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged ... according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests.

American-born lawyer and author Lindley Murray (1745-1826) was hailed by his admirers as the 'father of English grammar'. First published in 1795 and reissued here in its 1830 forty-fourth edition, English Grammar became the definitive textbook on the subject in the early nineteenth century. Murray divides the work into four sections: orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody. Treating his subject methodically, he reasons that sound instruction in grammar should begin with the form and sound of letters, continue to the different types of words, include guidelines on the construction of sentences, and provide advice on correct pronunciation. Accordingly, the book commences with the alphabet before moving on to more complex subjects, from verb conjugation through to versification. An appendix gives advice on writing more effectively. The work's huge success, in Britain and the United States, as well as in translation, testifies to its rigorous and unpretentious approach.

In the early 1960s, R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon was one of the first linguists to study the Aboriginal languages of northeast Queensland, Australia. He found that some languages of the coastal rainforest were still in daily use, but others were only half-remembered by a single elder. This autobiographical account of fourteen years of research, first published in 1984, paints a fascinating picture of the frontier society that existed in the region nearly fifty years ago. It reveals the difficulties and the excitement of linguistic fieldwork, but most of all it focuses on the people who agreed to work with Dixon and patiently helped him to understand their dauntingly complex languages. They allowed him to record their legends and songs and spent many hours answering his questions; this book is a poignant reminder of the fragility of their ancient culture.

Edward Morris (1843-1902), Professor of Modern Languages at Melbourne University, contributed material on 'words peculiar to Australia' to the OED. He expanded that research into this dictionary of the English spoken in Australasia, first published in 1898. Morris was able to draw on existing scholarly studies of Maori loan words in the language of settlers in New Zealand, but was the first to give detailed attention to the influence of Australian Aboriginal languages and list early appearances in English of words such as 'cooee' and 'boomerang'. The book also includes English words that developed Australasia-specific meanings to describe local flora, fauna and social conditions, and new scientific words such as 'eucalypt'. Morris' pioneering work provides unique insights into the development of English in Australia and New Zealand, and remains of interest not only to linguists but also to historians of Australasia and the British empire in the late Victorian period.

Thugs, or thuggees, were members of secretive gangs that robbed and sometimes murdered travellers in India; they were also said to worship the Hindu goddess Kali. The British colonial administrator William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856) took a special interest in these gangs and mounted a campaign to eradicate them. Between 1826 and 1840 thousands of Thugs were imprisoned or hanged. The outcome of the operation was due in part to Sleeman's focus on gathering intelligence about the gangs' coded communications. This substantial vocabulary, published in 1836, was compiled from conversations with informers and interrogations of prisoners. It includes words such as adhoreea, which means an intended victim who escaped being murdered, or dhurohurkurna, which is the verb 'to strangle'. The book contains much fascinating data for linguists and historians, and includes an appendix of cases and depositions that constitutes a useful source on crime in colonial India.

Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929) was a British Australian biologist and anthropologist, best known for his work amongst the indigenous Aboriginal tribes of Australia. After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford in 1884 Spencer was elected a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford in 1886 before being appointed the Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne. In 1911 Spencer was appointed Special Commissioner for Aborigines and undertook fieldwork in the Northern Territories between 1911-1912. This volume, first published in 1914, is the result of his fieldwork. Spencer describes in detail the social customs, kinship structures, marriage ceremonies and religious beliefs of thirteen tribes he encountered in the Northern Territories. Spencer also compares differences and similarities in the religious and social structures of different tribes and includes copious illustrations of religious and political monuments. This volume was the first ethnography of these tribes and provides valuable insights into these societies.

Sir Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929) was a British/Australian biologist and anthropologist, best known for his work amongst the indigenous Aboriginal tribes of Australia. After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford in 1884, Spencer was elected a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, before being appointed the Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne. In 1896 Spencer joined his friend and co-author Francis James Gillen (1855-1912) to undertake fieldwork during the Aboriginal tribal gathering known as the Engwura. This pioneering volume, first published in 1899, is the result of this fieldwork. Spencer and Gillen were initiated as members of the Arunta tribe and became the first Europeans to witness many tribal customs and social structures. The kinship structures, marriage and burial ceremonies and religious beliefs of several tribes are described. This fascinating volume influenced contemporary ideas concerning palaeolithic society and the origins of art and religion.

Coptic was the language spoken in Egypt from late ancient times to the seventeenth century, when it was overtaken by Arabic as the national language. Derived from ancient Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs, it was written in an adapted form of Greek script. This dictionary lists about 2,000 Coptic words whose etymology has been established from ancient Egyptian and Greek sources, covering two-thirds of the known Coptic vocabulary and complementing W. E. Crum's 1939 Coptic Dictionary, still the standard in the field. The Egyptian forms are quoted in hieroglyphic and/or demotic forms. An appendix lists the etymologies of Coptic place-names. The final work of Czech Egyptologist Jaroslav Cerny (1898-1970), Professor of Egyptology at Oxford, the Dictionary was brought through to publication by colleagues after his death.

John Mathew was a Presbyterian minister who developed an interest in Aboriginal ethnography after migrating from Scotland to work on his uncle's farm in Queensland in 1864. From 1879 he published influential studies of Aboriginal culture. Although Mathew's speculative argument for the tri-hybrid origins of the Australian Aborigines has long been disproved, his discussion of Aboriginal language and social behaviour was pioneering in the field of anthropology and is still well-regarded today. Two Representative Tribes of Queensland (1910) is the result of the extensive time Mathew spent visiting the Kabi and Wakka people living in the Barambah Government Aboriginal Station. This direct experience is emphasised in the preface to the book: 'For Mr Mathew Australian origins ... have been a life study, and the knowledge bearing upon these questions, which most others have gleaned from the library shelves, he has acquired at first-hand in the native camping grounds.'

This description of the Arawak language, once spoken widely across the Caribbean area but now restricted to some of the native peoples of Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname, was first published in 1928. C. H. de Goeje was a Dutch submariner whose work had taken him to the then Dutch colony of Suriname; on his resignation from the Dutch navy he continued to investigate its peoples and their languages, and was the recipient of a special Chair in languages and cultural anthropology at the University of Leiden. The book provides long vocabulary lists and a systematic exploration of grammar and phonetics; it also discusses the origin of the language and its differentiation from the other Carib languages of the region. An appendix gives anthropological data, including transcriptions and translations of Arawak myths.

First published in Paris in 1897, this book describes the expedition to the Xingu River in the Amazon region of Brazil by the French scientist and explorer Henri Coudreau. Coudreau spent five months from May to October 1896 travelling down the Xingu by boat, beginning at the river's southern origin at Vitoria and finishing in Para, where it joins the Amazon. He carried out the most detailed explorations of the region up to that time, and is deservedly regarded as one of the great early anthropologists of the Amazon. This book describes the region's distinct eco-system and its warrior-like indigenous peoples. The book, which Coudreau wrote in less than a month, is characteristic of his strongly opinionated writing. It contains 68 illustrations and a map of the Xingu River.