A Brill Calendar: August 17

Few autodidacts in the study of languages equal the feat of Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (Malakka, March 23 1824 – Surabaja August 17 1894).

This son of a colonial administrator started his professional career by accepting from the national ‘Bijbelgenootschap’- an agency inspired by the responsibility to spread the Holy Writ amongst indigenous peoples in the vast Indonesian archipelago - an invitation to shoulder this task for the Batak language. It also saw Van der Tuuk the first European to set eyes on Lake Toba, Sumatra.

His life-long fascination made him a founding father of comparative Malaysian-Polynesian linguistics as well; and opened up study of Old and Middle Javanese. Few scholars equal him in describing an exotic language: ‘A Grammar of Toba – Batak’ (2 Vols; 1864 – 1867) was reprinted more than hundred years later.

His polemics with Leyden Professor Taco Roorda (Britsum, Fryslân, July 19 1801 – Leyden, May 5 1874) became an archetype for the growth of fundamental studies in linguistics during the late nineteenth century. It is seldom, in this young millennium, that names like Winter, Roorda, Wilkens, Poensen, Roorda van Eysinga, von de Wall, Klinkert, van Ophuysen, Vreede, Jonker, van Ronkel en Hazeu still ring a bell. But the man who was probably the greatest of them all, Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern (Purworejo April 6 1833 – Utrecht July 4 1917), a Leyden Professor since 1865, would have been the first to draw attention to the old saying – as old as the European scholarship-tradition – that today’s scholars can only see further than before because they are standing on the shoulders of giants.