After the discovery of the New World the Europeans began to establish their hegemony in a new continent. European expansion, colonisation and christianisation of a large number and variety of Amerindian tribes was accompanied by the study and recording of the native languages of the Americas. In the same period, Christian missionary activities escalated in Asia, especially the Far East. The linguistic activities of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries during the colonial period are focussed on. Almost without exception grammars and dictionaries were composed by missionaries for missionaries. It has been argued that this pioneer work is not interesting from a linguistic point of view, since the missionaries always follow strictly the Greco-Latin grammatical model, even imposing this system on languages that are typologically completely different. However, the results of recent research demonstrate that this is not the case - many missionaries, if not the most, had an excellent command of these ‘exotic’ languages. These pioneers in many cases adapted, or even partially abandoned the Greco-Latin model in a ‘revolutionary’ way, focusing on the idiosyncratic features of the native languages themselves. It is also an established fact that the work of these missionaries was hardly known in the Old World and until today many works have never been studied nor analysed in a satisfactory way.
A frequently encountered problem with using older phonological documentation is the amount of incorrect identifications of phonological elements, underdifferentiation, and even overdifferentiation of the phonological units in the language or dialect concerned. However, with knowledge of later stages of the same or closely related speech-forms, or of earlier stages, we can frequently recover sufficient details of the systems, the phonological processes and even allophony, to provide useful material as a basis for further analysis and/or comparative work. While phonologists, in particular historical phonologists, frequently make reference to older phonological documentation in their work, this has often not moved much beyond the philological. This older documentation should be subject to strict phonological analysis, using an explicit methodology. A problem is that there is no general methodology of how to interpret such phonological records. General answers to problems of interpretation can be developed by taking the perspective of the naive recorder. The native language of the recorder can of course be a factor. The number of variables is considerable: the skill of the recorder, the language spoken by the recorder, the target language, the phonological distance between the two languages/dialects involved, with the first of these posing the greatest problems. However, even very bad recorders can reveal valuable information in terms of the mistakes they make, even to the extent of not recording particular sounds at all.
