Exhibit: Missionaries and Linguists: Jesuit Grammars from Africa and Native America

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From the 1600s, members of the Society of Jesus evangelized peoples living in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Often this meant that Jesuits encountered languages unknown in Europe, which lacked the familiar categories and features of Indo-European languages.

A typical first step for Jesuit missionaries was to develop a writing system for languages they encountered abroad. To do so, they drew on their knowledge of their own native languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), and on Latin and Greek. They also sometimes invented diacritics or new symbol/sound correspondences to represent the phonetic properties of indigenous languages.

Missionary-linguists also compiled dictionaries and descriptive grammars. As with the invention of writing systems, they drew on their previous language knowledge, especially of Latin. So powerful was the Latin grammatical model that some Jesuit grammarians tried to discover analogs to every detail of Latin in the languages spoken in the Andean highlands or on the banks of the Mekong River. Others innovated away from the Latin model to try to describe linguistic features they had never before imagined.

In this way, the creation of dictionaries and grammars records a facet of Jesuits’ experiences facing what, in many cases, was a profoundly different cultural world.