Papers, 1918-1978, of and relating to Malcolm Guthrie, including personal material;
field data, grammar and vocabulary notes on over 180 Bantu languages (major section
on Bemba); notes on his comparative work on the Bantu languages; early drafts of the
four volumes of Comparative Bantu; and general notes on the features of Bantu grammar.
Malcolm Guthrie was born in 1903, in Hove, Sussex, the son of a Scottish father and
Dutch mother. After leaving school, he gained a BSc in metallurgy at Imperial College,
London, thus perpetuating the strong engineering tradition of the Guthrie family.
However, shortly after graduating, he felt called to work in the Church and enrolled
at Spurgeon's College to study for the Ministry in 1925. He subsequently took up a
pastorate in Rochester, Kent. He married Margaret Helen Near in 1931.
In 1932, he was posted to Leopoldville as a missionary with the Baptist Missionary
Society, where his interest in language work developed. By 1934 he had published his
Lingala Grammar and Dictionary, the first of several books on Lingala including a
translation of the New Testament. During his 1935 furlough he studied at the School
of Oriental Studies (later the School of Oriental and African Studies). On returning
home from the mission field in 1940 he became lecturer, and subsequently senior lecturer
at SOAS in 1942. During two years study leave 1942-1944 he undertook a linguistic
field-study throughout Bantu Africa, collecting much of the data he used in his comparative
language work. His primary interests included tonology, which became the subject of
his doctoral thesis, The Tonal Structure of Bemba, and classification, which led to
the publication of The Classification of the Bantu Languages in 1948. By 1950, Malcolm
Guthrie was Head of the Department of African Languages and Culture at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, a post he held for 18 years. In addition to this
post he was a member of several boards including the Board of Studies in Oriental
and African Languages and Study (Chairman from 1960 to 1965); the Board of Studies
in Anthropology, Comparative Linguistics and Theology; the Board of the Faculty of
Arts (Vice-Dean from 1960 to 1967); the Advisory Boards in Colonial and Religious
Studies; the Committee of Management of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies; the
Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the African Studies Association
of the UK.
He undertook extensive study of Bemba, Lingala, Kongo, Fang, Mfinu and the Teke languages,
working on over 200 Bantu languages. Through his work on classification, he developed
a means of establishing the genetic relationship between languages by using his famous
two-stage method. This involved firstly collecting lexical items with a common meaning,
which could be related by consistent sound shifts and correspondences and symbolising
them by creating (hypothetical) starred forms collectively known as Common Bantu.
He then interpreted the inferences from this data in terms of pre-history, to present
a hypothesis of Bantu origins from a common ancestor language. By 1960 Guthrie had
finished stage one of his magnum opus Comparative Bantu, which appeared in 4 volumes
published in 1967 (volume 1), 1970 (volumes 3 and 4) and 1971 (volume 2).
During 1966-1968, Guthrie suffered from ill health. His wife also died from cancer
in 1968. That same year he was elected Fellow of the British Academy, the first time
this honour had been bestowed upon anyone in the field of African language study.
He died unexpectedly on 22 November 1972 of a heart attack, leaving his work on Bemba
Grammar, General Bantu Grammar, Lingala material and planned work on Teke unfinished.
Some of the preparatory material for these works can be found in this collection,
in addition to much of the data he used in the compilation of Comparative Bantu.
The collection is the property of the Baptist Missionary Society, held in trust by
SOAS.
The material is arranged into five sections: personal material; specific Bantu languages;
comparative Bantu material; general Bantu material; miscellaneous material.
Rights to access and re-use digital objects:
Unknown
For permission to publish, please contact Archives & Special Collections, SOAS Library
in the first instance
Unpublished handlist, including an index of languages.
The School of Oriental and African Studies also holds other papers on African languages,
including those of Archibald Norman Tucker (Ref: PP MS 43) and Peter Hackett (Ref:
MS 380514).
Subjects:
Academic teaching personnel
Bantu languages
Missionaries
Lexicography
Grammar
African languages
Field work
Linguistics
Linguists
Travel abroad
Vocabularies
Clergy
Geographic names:
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa
Central Africa
Eastern Africa
Southern Africa
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Archives, University of London