Missionary descriptions of Mande languages: verbal morphology in 19th century grammars

In spite of the prominent role of missionary linguists in shaping the field of modern African linguistics, the approaches adopted in their early grammar descriptions remain virtually unstudied, just as the descriptions themselves are largely ignored by modern linguists. This study explores the ways two 19th century missionary grammarians, R. Maxwell MacBrair and John Kemp, approached the task of describing verbal morphology of two languages from the Mande family, Mandinka and Susu. I discuss important differences between their approach and the one that has become prevalent in modern descriptive studies; these differences reflect to a large extent the different interests and goals of missionary and academic linguists. I also use the example of the two early grammars to illustrate the diversity of attitudes and approaches to language description concealed behind the label “missionary linguistics”. Even in the narrow domain of verbal morphology – which is far from prominent in the isolating Mande languages – the two grammarians resort to very different strategies for coping with the otherness of the material they describe. The diversity gives us a glimpse of the early stages of the development of a typology-sensitive descriptive tradition that informed the study of African languages as we presently know it.