Stella Gevorgyan-Ninness and Ian Stewart, "Informal Networks and Official Surveys: Language Collecting in the Nineteenth Century"
This session features two papers about 19th collection practices, which should provide rich opportunities for comparative analysis (!).
Stella Gevorgyan-Ninness, "Creating Language Expertise: Informal Transnational Networks in the Nineteenth Century"
This presentation offers some preliminary results from a chapter in my manuscript on the acquisition of linguistic knowledge among Armenian, German, and Russian scholars in the nineteenth century. It deals with the contribution of informal networks to scholarship. Using my circulation of knowledge research, it is possible to observe from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, missionaries and lay people from different countries were interested in Slavic languages and Native American languages.
This cooperation led to changes in two areas: firstly, missionaries and lay people helped advance language science, and secondly, their disagreement but also agreement about how language science should be written helped to place language expertise in institutions and begin the work of writing a nation’s language history. This professionalization of language science separated many loosely connected interests in ethnographic research, travel literature, the study of society into separate disciplines. These developments provide a bridge for understanding the European comparative historical linguistics of Franz Bopp, August Schleicher, and Jacob Grimm from the early to the mid-nineteenth century which created a new system of language classification. This research would not have been possible without the work of missionaries and lay scholars including women. My paper will provide a few examples of these informal transnational networks devoted to Slavic and Native American languages.
Ian Stewart, "The First Linguistic Survey of India, c. 1806-c. 1811"
This article recovers the history of the first systematic British attempts to survey the languages of India. Long before George Abraham Grierson proposed his monumental survey of Indian languages, the Scottish judge James Mackintosh suggested a similar undertaking to the Literary Society of Bombay in 1806. This article follows those who pursued the project over the next five years. Their efforts stretched across India, the northwest frontier into Afghanistan, east into Burma, as far north as Nepal and all the way south into Ceylon. Almost all of those involved in these efforts were Scots educated at the University of Edinburgh, and so as well as reconstructing a forgotten chapter in the history of British imperialism, this article supplements our pictures of the histories of imperial knowledge production and Scottish orientalism.
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