Renward Brandstetter


Renward Brandstetter was a Swiss philologist and linguist who published about medieval and modern Swiss German and the older Swiss theatre history and studied the insular Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Work

Brandstetter reconstructed the sound system and a preliminary dictionary of what he called "Original Indonesian". In his observations he was the first to develop a theory of Austronesian roots.
He observed that the predominantly disyllabic lexemes of the languages under consideration contain a recurrent -CVC element which carries a somewhat consistent meaning. He indexed his manuscript lexicons of the principal languages of the region by their root, and then produced a list of hypothetical shared roots by comparing these lists across languages. His conclusions were considered problematic, and little attention was paid by later scholars of the language group, Otto Dempwolff and Otto Dahl, in their reconstructions of the protolanguage.
His papers are collected at the Haus zum Dolder, his library at the Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern.

Selected writings

Ein Prodromus zu einem vergleichenden Wörterbuch der malaio-polinesischen Sprachen für Sprachforscher und Ethnographen. Lucerne, 1906.An Introduction to Indonesian linguistics, trans. by C. O. Blagden, 1–65. London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1916. Wie Menschen der indonesischen Erde, 11 volumes, Luzerne, 1921-1937

Literature and bibliography

  • Ed. by Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Berne, 2012.
  • Blust, Robert & Schneider, Jürg : A World of Words. Revisiting the Work of Renward Brandstetter on Lucerne and Austronesia. Wiesbaden 2012.