Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by…
Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the…
Jane Simpson Australian National University 1. Introduction In colonial Australia (1788–1901), only about a dozen women are recorded as documenting Australian languages, compared with nearly 300 women contributors to herbariums (Maroske and Vaughan 2014), and with the 100 or so…
Zanna Van Loon University of Leuven Introduction Instead of imposing European languages, Catholic friars conducting missions in the Americas in the early modern period opted to learn indigenous tongues to more efficiently teach local communities the religious doctrine. To guarantee…
David Moore University of Western Australia Introduction The view that Australian Aboriginal languages are primitive endured into the twentieth century and is still widespread throughout the Australian community. ‘Primitive languages’ were a means of using linguistic evidence from a language to…
Nick Thieberger University of Melbourne Can a missionary make a change to a language so that an existing construction is replaced by one based on English? This is what appears to have happened in Nafsan, Efate, in Vanuatu, which has independently…
David Moore University of Western Australia Introduction This article explores the outstanding contribution of German Lutheran missionaries to linguistics, language documentation and translation in Aboriginal languages in Central Australia from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the years…
Roxana Sarion University of Tromsø, Norway MatÃas RuÃz Blanco (1643-1705/1708?) was a Franciscan friar who served as a missionary, historian and linguist in colonial Venezuela. Born in the village of Estepa in the Spanish region of Andalusia, he was devoted…
Marlon James SALES Monash University The pastoral visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines in January 2015, which gathered the biggest crowd ever assembled for a Papal event in history, has put to fore the nexus between translation and religion in…
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 