Polyglotta Africana
|
|
Polyglotta Africana is a study written by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle in 1854 in which he compared 156 African languages (or about 120 according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language). As a comparative study it was a major breakthrough at the time.
Koelle based his material on first hand observations, mostly with freed slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He transcribed the data using a uniform phonetic script devised by the Egyptologist Lepsius. Koelle's transcriptions were not always accurate; for example, he persistently confused /s/ and /z/ and , . His data were consistent enough however to enable tentative groupings of languages based on vocabulary resemblances.
Reference
- Koelle, S.W., 1854, Polyglotta Africana, or a comparative vocabulary of nearly three hundred words and phrases, in more than one hundred distinct African languages. 188p. London, Church Missionary House.