[CCC] Lecture on Canadian Topic

[Stacey Hickson]

Dear Canadian Club,

 

The Cambridge University Linguistic Society is hosting a lecture next
Thursday, 17 January that may be of interest to you. The abstract and other
details are below.

 

Following the talk, there will be an opportunity for members of the audience
to dine with the speaker at The Rice Boat in Newnham. The price for students
will be £12 for a two-course set menu (drinks and extras to be paid
separately). The estimated price for non-students is £14. Anyone who would
like to join us for the dinner should RSVP to me at mmd27 at cam.ac.uk no later
than Wednesday at noon.

 

Regards,

Marcus Duyzend

Secretary, Cambridge University Linguistic Society

 

******************

Speaker: Dr. Marcus Tomalin, Department of Engineering, University of
Cambridge 

Title: `a fair knowledge of their tongue': Re-evaluating Missionary
Linguistics

Date: Thursday, 17 January 2008

Time: 17:00 (tea and biscuits from 16:30)

Venue: English Faculty (Sidgwick Site), Room GR06-07

 

Abstract

 

In recent years, `missionary linguistics' has emerged as an independent 

academic discipline, and research in this area generally focuses on the 

language-based studies that were produced by missionaries from the 17th to 

the 20th centuries. In many countries around the world, these studies 

provided the first detailed analyses of a wide range of languages, and 

therefore they merit careful consideration.

 

Accordingly, in this talk, the linguistic studies and translations produced
by 

the Pacific Northwest Coast missionaries William Henry Collison (1847-1922),


Charles Harrison (d.1926) and John Henry Keen (c.1851-1950) will be 

(re-)evaulated and contextualised. Collison, Harrison, and Keen were 

responsible for running the Church Missionary Society station at Masset on 

the Haida Gwaii archipelago, and they all wrote detailed analyses of Haida. 

Since Haida is now classified as being endangered, these texts are of 

especial interest since they constitute the earliest philological accounts
of 

the language. However, it is the methodology adopted in these texts that is 

most intriguing. For instance, rather than mindlessly imposing a
Graeco-Roman 

framework upon Haida, the missionaries usually synthesised different
analytical approaches, thereby creating innovative, hybrid formalisms which 

initiated a tradition of comparative Amerindian linguistics. In addition,
the 

Haida scripture translations that they produced enable their linguistic work


to be considered in the context of their theological and socio-political 

convictions.

 

Since Haida was subsequently studied extensively by people such as Franz
Boas 

(1858-1942) and John Swanton (1873-1958), the relationship between the 

missionaries and the anthropologists is of some importance. It is often 

claimed, for instance, that each group was unaware of the other's endeavours


-- indeed, the two movements are sometimes presented as having been 

antagonistically antithetical. This view is, however,  far too simplistic, 

and, as this talk will demonstrate, there were several surprising 

interactions between these two contrasting traditions.

 

 

Stacey Hickson

Vascular Research Clinic

ACCI Level 3, Box 110

Addenbrooke's Hospital

Cambridge, CB2 2QQ

 

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