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''Polyglotta Africana'' is a study written by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle in 1854 in which he compared 156 African languages (or about 120 according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language). As a comparative study it was a major breakthrough at the time. Koelle based his material on first hand observations, mostly with freed slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He transcribed the data using a uniform phonetic script devised by the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius. Koelle's transcriptions were not always accurate; for example, he persistently confused with and with . His data were consistent enough, however, to enable groupings of languages based on vocabulary resemblances. Notably, the groups which he set up correspond in a number of cases to modern groups: *North-West Atlantic — Atlantic *North-Western High Sudan/Mandenga — Mande *North-Eastern High Sudan — Gur ==References== *Koelle, S.W., 1854, ''Polyglotta Africana, or a comparative vocabulary of nearly three hundred words and phrases, in more than one hundred distinct African languages''. 188p. London, Church Missionary House. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Polyglotta Africana」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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