| Popis: |
IN A SENSE, it is not strictly accurate to speak of the 'rediscovery' of the Indian languages, for since the time of John Eliot the missionaries had been studying these languages. From their standpoint, their objective was practical: the more they knew of the languages of the Indians, the more successfully they could convert the heathen to Christianity. However, from a scholarly standpoint, it is accurate to speak of such a rediscovery. With the development of linguistics into a comparative science, in the early nineteenth century, the broadening interests of linguists led them naturally to a consideration of the fascinating complexity and diversity of the languages of the New World. In this sense, the languages of the North American Indians, discovered by the early settlers, may be said to have been rediscovered by the nineteenth-century linguists and philologists. The names of Peter S. Du Ponceau and John Pickering loom large in the early scientific study of American languages. Largely forgotten today, they were industrious and influential scholars in the early years of the nineteenth century. Their enthusiastic appraisals of earlier works and their own not inconsiderable collecting, comparison, and theorizing did much to further this field of linguistic study. Edgerton comments that 'one of Du Ponceau's merits was the stimulus and inspiration which he gave to correspondents all over the world." The work of Pickering has endured longest in its influence on the orthography of the Hawaiian language.2 Du Ponceau's first published contribution of importance was a report made in 8 19 to the Historical Committee of the American Philosophical Society. This followed his undertaking a translation of an Indian grammar by David Zeisberger and the ensuing correspondence with John Heckewelder, both Moravian missionaries among the Delaware Indians. Du Ponceau reached the following conclusions |
