Glossing in the Linguistic Survey of India

Abstract

Summary In this article, I explore glossing practices in the period surrounding the publication of the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), the large-scale survey of languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent at the turn of the 20th century, under the stewardship of George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941). After a brief discussion of the reasons that the LSI constitutes a useful corpus for studying glossing practices, I provide a detailed examination of the glossing practices used in the text specimens which accompany language descriptions in the LSI. I then contrast these practices with glossing in materials produced both prior to and subsequent to the LSI, in order to place the glossing practices established by Grierson within a historical context, thereby contributing a description of one step in the history of glossing of descriptive linguistic materials.