Christian Ludwig Schumann

Christian Ludwig Schumann (1749–1794 or 1795) was a Moravian missionary, translator and lexicographer active in Suriname and later in Danish India. He is chiefly known for two manuscript dictionaries: the 1778 Saramaccanisch Deutsches Wörter-Buch, a Saramaccan–German dictionary, and the 1783 Neger-Englisches Wörter-Buch, a Sranan Tongo–German dictionary. Schumann's dictionaries are among the most important eighteenth-century sources for the history of the Surinamese Creole languages and for the comparative study of creole languages.

Early life and family

Schumann was born in 1749 at Pilgerhut, a Moravian mission station in Berbice, then a Dutch colony and now part of Guyana. He was the son of the Moravian missionary Theophilus Salomo Schumann and Anna Maria Sonntag. Theophilus Schumann was born on 1 July 1719 at Grabow, in Brandenburg, studied at Halle from 1738, joined the Moravian community at Herrnhut in 1743, and was sent to Berbice as a missionary among Arawak speakers. He reached Pilgerhut with Anna Maria Sonntag in October 1748, learned the Arawak language, preached without an interpreter, translated religious texts and prepared Arawak linguistic materials. Anna Maria Sonntag died in Berbice before Theophilus returned to Europe in 1758; Theophilus later remarried at Zeist and died at Pilgerhut on 6 October 1760.

Like many children of overseas Moravian missionaries, Schumann was educated in Europe. In September 1758, when Theophilus Schumann travelled to Europe with two daughters, his son had already been for several years in a Moravian Pädagogium, indicating that Christian Ludwig's European schooling had begun by the mid-1750s. He later worked as a teacher at the Moravian Pedagogical Institute at Niesky, in Upper Lusatia, before being sent to Suriname.

The Niesky institution belonged to a wider Moravian educational network. Niesky became known as a Moravian school town after Nicolaus Zinzendorf moved the Boys' Institute there from Herrnhaag in 1751. The town housed a boys' boarding school, a theological seminary, a mission school and a teachers' seminary, and its educational ideals combined Moravian piety with the pedagogical traditions associated with John Amos Comenius and August Hermann Francke.

Missionary work in Suriname

Schumann returned to the Guianas as a Moravian missionary in late 1776. He first learned the colonial creole then commonly called "Negro-English", now known as Sranan Tongo, in Paramaribo and subsequently worked in the interior mission field. His first Surinamese posting was at Saron, among Arawak speakers, where he completed an Arawak–German dictionary begun by his father; this material was later published in Paris together with Theophilus Schumann's Arawak grammar.

Schumann later served at Bambey, a Moravian mission station in the country of the Saramaccan Maroons. The mission was fragile: Schumann's colleague Michael Lehmann died within a month of his arrival, Schumann himself suffered from skin and intestinal disorders, two replacement missionaries died within a month, and Bambey was eventually closed. Schumann returned to Paramaribo, but by then he had produced the 1778 Saramaccan–German dictionary in less than nine months, using earlier Moravian materials and the linguistic help of Saramaka speakers. Schumann returned to Germany in 1783, having compiled both the Saramaccan and Sranan Tongo dictionaries for which he is now chiefly remembered.

Saramaccan dictionary

Schumann's Saramaccanisch Deutsches Wörter-Buch of 1778 is one of the earliest substantial documents of the Saramaccan language. The dictionary remained in manuscript during Schumann's lifetime and was later edited by Hugo Schuchardt in Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam, where it was printed on pages 44–120. The original manuscript is held in the Moravian archives in Paramaribo and has been incorporated into the source base of the Suriname Creole Archive.

The dictionary was based partly on earlier missionary work, but its most important named collaborator was Johannes Alabi, later gaanman (paramount chief) of the Saramaccans. Alabi was a native speaker and a fourth-generation Maroon, making him an especially important informant for Schumann's Saramaccan materials. Schumann also practised Saramaccan with two enslaved household workers at Bambey.

Schumann's Saramaccan dictionary used a German-based orthography similar to that of his later Sranan Tongo dictionary. Saramaccan is a tonal language, but tone was not consistently indicated, an important limitation for modern linguistic reconstruction of Saramaccan. At the same time, the dictionary remains crucial because it records Saramaccan at a comparatively early stage and preserves lexical material relevant to the language's English, Portuguese and African components.

Sranan Tongo dictionary

Schumann's 1783 Neger-Englisches Wörter-Buch is a Sranan Tongo–German dictionary. The 1783 manuscript identifies itself as an editio tertia, suggesting earlier copying or draft stages. Orthographic differences between a version of 1780 or 1781 and the 1783 form indicate revision in the transmission of the work. The manuscript is preserved in Moravian archival collections in Utrecht and Paramaribo and was published in André A. Kramp's 1983 Leiden dissertation, Early Creole Lexicography: A Study of C. L. Schumann's Manuscript Dictionary of Sranan.

The dictionary is not merely a word list. It contains example sentences, grammatical observations and social labels attached to particular forms. Schumann distinguished such varieties or registers as Plantasi tongo ("plantation speech"), Foto tongo ("town speech", especially Paramaribo usage), Djutongo ("Jewish speech" or speech associated with Jewish plantation contexts), Ningre or Nengre tongo ("Black people's speech"), and Bakratongo ("white people's speech"). Both the Saramaccan and Sranan Tongo dictionaries contain grammatical information dispersed among lexical entries.

Schumann's Sranan Tongo spelling preserves evidence for phonological distinctions no longer represented in the same way in later Sranan, including a voicing contrast in labial and alveolar fricatives. His use of final vowels in spellings such as forms ending in -e is also relevant to reconstructing earlier stages of Surinamese creole phonology.

The Sranan Tongo dictionary is also important for the history of Djutongo. Schumann described Djutongo as the speech in which the local "Negro language" was mixed with Portuguese, and he associated it with the Saramaccans. Smith argues that Djutongo should not be equated simply with Saramaccan and that it was a creole associated with the Suriname River and with Portuguese-Jewish plantation contexts; it had African, English and Portuguese components, influenced Saramaccan, and later declined as a separate variety while some of its lexical items entered Sranan more generally. Nineteen expressions are labelled Djutongo in Schumann's 1783 dictionary, only twelve of which also appeared in Schumann's 1778 Saramaccan dictionary.

Enslaved and Maroon collaborators

Schumann's linguistic work depended on enslaved and Maroon speakers. He practised Saramaccan with two enslaved household workers at Bambey, one man and one woman. Enslaved people were brought from Paramaribo for use by the missionaries, and Schumann left Bambey with two enslaved people and several enslaved children.

The named collaborator who emerges most clearly from the sources is Johannes Alabi. He was not merely an informant in a passive sense, but a literate Christian Saramaccan leader whose political and religious position made him a mediator between the Moravian mission and Saramaccan society. Saramaccan interest in Moravian missionaries was linked not only to religion but also to literacy, since Alabi and others wanted children to learn reading and writing.

Social history in the dictionaries

Schumann's example sentences and usage labels provide unusually detailed glimpses of eighteenth-century Surinamese social history. They show that Sranan Tongo was not a uniform plantation jargon but a socially differentiated language with urban, plantation, Jewish, Black and European-associated varieties. For example, Schumann's notes on forms labelled Djutongo show the linguistic importance of Jewish-owned plantation zones along the Suriname River and the afterlife of Portuguese-influenced speech in the colony. His distinction between plantation and city forms also helps historians reconstruct differences between Paramaribo speech and rural plantation speech. Since large-scale Moravian plantation missions began only later, the unmarked Sranan forms in Schumann's dictionary probably reflect urban rather than plantation norms, while explicitly labelled plantation forms preserve evidence of rural variation.

The sentence material also captures speech acts of everyday life: correction, rebuke, prayer, work, poverty, kinship and interaction between speakers of different status. Such examples make the dictionaries important not only for lexicography and historical phonology but also for the social history of slavery, missionization and urban life in colonial Suriname.

South Asia and death

After his return to Germany in 1783, Schumann had moved to the Moravian mission station in the countryside of Tranquebar, a Danish colonial settlement on the Coromandel Coast, by 1789. The Moravian Church maintained this station from 1760 to 1803 as a base for mission and settlement activity connected especially with the Nicobar Islands. Tranquebar is present-day Tharangambadi in Tamil Nadu, India; the Moravian Brüdergarten or "Brethren's Garden" was in the Tranquebar countryside, near the present Tharangambadi–Porayar area. His documented intellectual activity in South Asia is meteorological rather than linguistic; meteorological observations by Schumann survive for 1789–1791 and were received by the Danish-Halle missionary Christoph Samuel John in January 1792.

Schumann died at Brüdergarten, Tranquebar, in India, in 1794 or possibly 1795.

References

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