THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 869, 16 July 1910, Page 9

THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE

It is interesting to note that this year the French Academy has awarded tho Stanislas Julien Prizo founded for the encouragement of research into Oriental languages, to a Catholic missionary of the Far East, Pore Vial, for his dictionary or the Lolo dialect, spoken by some of the aboriginal tribes of.Tonkin. This is the first dictionary of the kind. It'has been compiled by Pore A lal not from books, for the tribes have no literature, but by taking down the words as spoken by the tribesmen. Like so , many other missionaries of the Catholic Church, who have done valuable scientific ■ work of this kind, his object was simply to enable other missionaries more easily to acquire the language of the people among whom they go to preach. It is remarkable how much pioneer work of the kind our missionaries havo done. It was a Jesuit missionary, the famous De' Nobih, who discovered the very' existence of the sacred language of the Brahmins of India, and so laid the foundation of the whole modem science of'language, fho Protestant missionary, Morrison' is generally spoken of as the. translator ot the Bible into Chinese, but his memoirs show that he transcribed most of his version from a Chinese Bible the work of ono of the earlv Catholic missionaries. ■ And most of the languages of the American Indians and not a few African languages were first reduced to writing by our Catholic missionaries.— "Catholic Times " ,■