• Title
  Letter from Max Müller to Captain William Mayne relating to documentation of Aboriginal languages, 17 November 1867.
• Creator
  F. Max (Friedrich Max) Müller, 1823-1900
• Call number
  MLMSS 9747
  
• Level of description
  fonds
• Date
  
  1867
• Type of material
  Textual Records
• Reference code
  1379429
• Physical Description
  0.01 metres of textual material (1 folder)
  
• ADMINISTRATIVE/ BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY
  
  Max Müller (1823-1900) championed the preservation of Aboriginal languages around the world. Within a year of writing this letter he became Oxford’s first Professor of Comparative Philology.
  
  References:
  Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/ (accessed 17 November 2015)
• Scope and Content
  Autograph letter signed by Max Müller, Parks End, Oxford, to W. C. Mayne Esq. in which Müller thanks Mayne for forwarding two works on the languages of Australian Aborigines; expresses wish that languages, traditions, and customs of Aboriginal races may be saved; writes of his belief that 'There are certain processes in the growth of language which can be illustrated only by observations of what takes place in the dialects of people so low in the scale of civilsiation'; states that 'to the student of language a comparative grammar of the dialect of Australia would at present be more valuable than the most learned treatises on Sanskrit or Hebrew'.
• Copying Conditions
  Copyright status:: In copyright
  Research & study copies allowed: Author has been deceased for more than 50 years
• Published Information
  This letter was published in the Sydney newspaper The Empire, 8 February 1868, ‘courtesy of the Honorable T. A. Murray’. Sir Terence Aubrey Murray (1810-1873) was the executive commissioner for the exhibit from New South Wales at the Paris Exhibition in 1866-1867, where the recipient of the letter, Captain William Colburn Mayne (1808-1902), also acted as head of the the New South Wales commission at the Paris Exhibition. It was perhaps here that the letter became known to Murray who passed it on to The Empire for publication.
  The letter was cited 19 years later by Edward Micklethwaite Curr in defence of his compilation of Aboriginal vocabularies: The Australian race : its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia, and the routes by which it spread itself over that continent / Edward M. Curr. Melbourne : John Farnes, Govt. Printer ; London : Trübner, 1886-1887.
• Name
  Mayne, William Colburn, 1808-1902
  Murray, Terence Aubrey, Sir, 1810-1873
  Empire (Sydney, N.S.W.)
  
• Subject
  Aboriginal Australians--Languages.
  Scholars--Correspondence.
  
• Open Rosetta viewer
  IE8859790

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