Kennen Sie schon … RELiCTA?

Das Reper­to­ry of Ear­ly-Mod­ern Lin­guis­tic and Cat­e­chet­i­cal Tools of Amer­i­ca, Asia, and Africa ange­siedelt am Cen­ter for the His­to­ri­og­ra­phy of Lin­guis­tics der Uni Leu­ven, unter­stützt die Forschung zur Mis­sion­arslin­guis­tik:

RELiCTA’s name alludes to the both dor­mant and pre­car­i­ous nature of the exten­sive body of mis­sion­ary tools. RELiC­TA cov­ers ear­ly mod­ern lin­guis­tic and cat­e­chet­i­cal tools for non-Euro­pean lan­guages, offer­ing meta­da­ta such as author­ship, place and date of pub­li­ca­tion, reprints. We hope that this data­base will increase gen­er­al aware­ness of the val­ue of these sources — a nec­es­sary first step in fight­ing obliv­ion and loss. In addi­tion, the data­base will enable schol­ars to approach the body of mis­sion­ary lin­guis­tic tools from a bird’s‑eye per­spec­tive.

RELiC­TA aims to go beyond a mere col­lec­tion of all rel­e­vant pri­ma­ry source mate­r­i­al. We hope that the data­base can also shed light on the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

- what is the approx­i­mate extent of lin­guis­tic and cat­e­chet­i­cal doc­u­ments com­posed by mis­sion­ary lin­guists? How many doc­u­ments do we know of? How many are still pre­served?

— what can be said, in a com­par­a­tive way, about mis­sion­ary lin­guis­tics in the Amer­i­c­as and in Asia in that peri­od?

— what is the pro­por­tion between the num­ber of gram­mars and the num­ber of wordlists?

— which indige­nous lan­guages are often described, and which ones rarely or nev­er?

— how is the suc­ces­sion of descrip­tions of cer­tain lan­guages in terms of time – short­er or longer peri­ods?

Das Por­tal ist im Dezem­ber 2020 freigeschal­tet wor­den; einige Bere­iche wer­den noch weit­er entwick­elt.