Glossing in the Linguistic Survey of India: Some insights into early 20th century glossing practices
AiméeLahaussois
C.N.R.S., Université de Paris
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.
Glossing is a widespread practice in cultures with a written tradition and is found over a wide range of historical periods
and linguistic traditions. Good descriptions of practices in Medieval Europe (Cinato 2015;
Teeuwen & van Renswoude 2017, among many others), the Far East (Whitman et al. 2010; Whitman 2014; Kosukegawa 2014; Alberizzi 2014), modern-day
descriptive linguistics (Lehmann 1982; Lehmann
2004) exist, but no conclusive general historiography of the practice has been produced as of yet (see, however, Cinato,
Lahaussois and Whitman, forthcoming, which is a first attempt at looking at glossing from a comparative point of view).
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