Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk
| Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
23 February 1824 Dutch Malacca, Malaya (now Malacca, Malaysia) |
| Died | 17 August 1894 (aged 70) Surabaya, Dutch East Indies |
| Fields | Linguistics |
Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (23 February 1824 – 17 August 1894) was a Bible translator and linguist specialising in the languages of the Dutch East Indies.
Van der Tuuk was born in Malacca (part of the Dutch East Indies at that time), where his father, a Dutch lawyer, had settled and had married a half German and half Dutch Eurasian wife named Louisa. Her surname being Neubronner, it was added as a middle name to “Herman”. In 1825, the Treaty of London (1824) took effect, and Malacca became British in exchange for Bengkulu (a region in Sumatra). As a consequence, the Van der Tuuk family moved to Surabaya on the Isle of Java.
At the age of about twelve, Van der Tuuk was sent to the Netherlands, where he attended grammar school and in 1840, aged sixteen, took the entrance exam to Groningen University. He read law, but his interests were in the field of linguistics, and in 1845 he moved to Leiden University to read Arabic and Persian with Th.W. Juynboll, a famous scholar in Arabic studies. Van der Tuuk also read Sanskrit and acquired a thorough grounding in Malay.
Linguistic activities in the Dutch East Indies were motivated by missionary activities until well into the nineteenth century. Linguistic studies were taken up with a view to translating the Bible into Indonesian languages, and Malay and Javanese served as starting points. By the middle of the nineteenth century, religious linguists were ready to turn to research into other indigenous languages and to translate the Bible into them.
One of the first languages (or rather, language groups) chosen for this purpose was Batak. The choice was motivated by political motives as well as religious ones. Roman Catholic missionaries, who had been banned from carrying out their activities, were re-admitted to the colony from 1807, and throughout the nineteenth century were in tough competition with their Protestant opposite numbers. Another motive was the desire to keep Islam in check. The Malay population of East-Sumatra and of the coastal regions had become predominantly Muslim by this time, but the ethnic groups in the interior had not been converted, and were, as contemporary terminology had it, still “pagans”. It was assumed they would be more receptive to conversion than those already Islamised. Among these interior tribes were the Batak. Protestant mission from the Netherlands was in the hands of Nederlands Bijbel Genootschap (“Society for the Translation of the Bible”, NBG).
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