Bøger i Cambridge Library Collection - Linguistics serien

Published in 1874, this groundbreaking monograph on the palaeography of southern India gained great scholarly acclaim. Arthur Coke Burnell (1840-82) served in the Indian Civil Service and as a judge, also building up a large collection of original or copied Sanskrit manuscripts. Originally intended as an introduction to his vast and pioneering Classified Index to the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Palace at Tanjore (1880), this work won Burnell an honorary doctorate at the University of Strasbourg. Replete with documentary evidence, it contains copies and explanations of numerous texts, the decipherment of which threw new light upon an obscure chapter in the history of writing, offering new theories for dating the introduction of writing into India and the origin of southern Indian alphabets and numerals. Although Burnell's work has since been built on and sometimes superseded, this is still a much-cited resource in South Asian palaeography and epigraphy.

In 1876 the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf und Hartel launched a series on Indo-European languages entitled 'Bibliothek Indogermanischer Grammatiken'. The first three volumes covered phonology, Greek and Sanskrit. This short introduction to the comparative method, published in 1880, was the fourth. It was highly successful, with six editions appearing between 1880 and 1919. Its author, Berthold Delbruck (1842-1922), Professor of Sanskrit at Jena, was a former student of the pioneering Indo-Europeanist Franz Bopp. Delbruck expanded the horizons of the field to cover syntax as well as phonology and morphology; his magisterial studies of Sanskrit and Indo-European syntax (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection) appeared between 1886 and 1900. This book, designed as a guide for readers of the Breitkopf series, includes a fascinating history of Indo-European philology from its founding fathers Jones and Bopp through Humboldt, Schleicher and Curtius to Delbruck's own time, and outlines the most recent developments.

In this 1901 work, Berthold Delbruck (1842-1922), who is famous for his contribution to the study of the syntax in Indo-European languages, focuses on Wilhelm Wundt's understanding of speech. Wundt (1832-1920), often referred to as the 'father of experimental psychology', held that language was one of the most important aspects of mental processing. In order to account for Wundt's theories on the nature of the soul, and his belief that emotion and perception are acts of experience rather than objects, Delbruck compares Wundt's theories with those of psychologist and educationalist J. F. Herbart (1776-1841). Delbruck also pays attention to the explanation of such topics as the hand gestures used by actors (and the people of Naples), the sentence structure of the German language, and onomatopoeia, though he emphasises that he has not addressed those elements in Wundt's works which are founded in psychology rather than in grammar.

In this fourth part of his general work on syntax, published in 1879, Berthold Delbruck (1842-1922), the German scholar remembered for his contribution to the study of the syntax in Indo-European languages (his three-volume Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen is also reissued in this series), concentrates on the syntax of ancient Greek. His focus is deliberately broad as he seeks to engage classicists who are interested in linguistics or in how the Greek language was actually used, rather than in highly specialised case studies. In twelve chapters, Delbruck guides the reader through the gender and case of nouns, and explains some features seen as peculiarities of Homeric Greek which in fact demonstrate its kinship as an Indo-European language with the Vedic language of the Hindu scriptures. He also covers the tenses and moods of verbs, prepositions, pronouns and particles, and word order.

The German linguist and mythologist Heymann Steinthal (1823-99) taught at the University of Berlin (today Humboldt-University Berlin) and was especially engaged with Wilhelm von Humboldt and his linguistic works. He was a co-founder of the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory). This innovatory volume, published in 1855, draws a connection between the disciplines of linguistics and psychology, and further relates them to the issue of logic. The three parts of the book deal with the nature of grammar, its relation to logic and the connection of grammar and linguistics to cognitive behaviour. Finally Steinthal discusses the idea of linguistics as ethnopsychology. Pursuing this concept, he, with his brother-in-law Moritz Lazarus, co-founded the journal Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal for Ethnopsychology and Linguistics) in 1860, thus laying the foundations for a promising new area of research.

John William Colenso (1814-83) was appointed the first Bishop of Natal in 1853 and settled there in 1855. He devoted great energy to developing the diocese, overseeing the completion of the cathedral in Pietermaritzburg, the building of churches in Durban and Richmond and the establishment of mission stations. He also learned Zulu and set up a printing press. He published a Zulu grammar in 1855, within months of his arrival, and translated the New Testament into Zulu. This substantial Zulu-English dictionary appeared in 1861, with financial support from the colonial legislature. It contains over 10,000 entries, many with examples of usage, and includes loan words from European languages. The Preface provides brief notes on phonology, and explains Colenso's orthographic principles, criteria for selection, and the structure of the entries. The dictionary remained a standard work even after Colenso's death, and a fourth revised edition was published in 1905.

Amassed over a forty-year career, first with the East India Company in Sumatra and later with the Admiralty as its First Secretary, William Marsden's library, as revealed in this catalogue of 1827, was an invaluable collection. An expert in Asian languages, Marsden (1754-1836) published his catalogue to provide a basis for study into comparative linguistics and oriental literature. This work provides an insight into both the practice of book-collecting in the period, and the variety of works published throughout the world. It lists texts on travel, medicine and linguistics, as well as works of literature and religion, including some extremely rare Bibles, and a possibly unique copy of the Book of Genesis in the Algonquin language. The library itself was donated to King's College, London, in 1835 and is now shared by King's College and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.