[INDOLOGY] First use of 'Indology'

Wed Feb 20 12:00:27 UTC 2013

Dear Malcolm,

You gave a lowest threshold of 1800 to Google Ngram. When I first saw this question raised on the new version of the Indology forum (btw: many-many great THANKS to Dominik and the rest of his team for having proceeded to such a smooth migration of an essential tool for our community), I tried it with a range of 1700 to 1800 and it gave one occurence of "Indology" (mind the case with Ngram) in… 1765: 

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Indology&year_start=1700&year_end=1800&corpus=15&smoothing=1&share=

When you look at "Search in Google Books" for 1700-1765 on the bottom left of the above mentioned Ngram page you end up on volume 7 of "The Spectator" dated 1959, which apparently has an article on "Early Indology" on p. 484, but you won't be able to go farther as the material is copyrighted: 

http://books.google.ch/books?id=4PMhAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Indology%22&dq=%22Indology%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=s68kUfLjF9SFhQfnvIDYCA&redir_esc=y

Now if you come one step back with your browser you will notice that the intermediate Google page mentions two names of seventeenth-eighteenth century gentlemen with links: Richard Steele (1672-1729)  and Joseph Addison (1672-1719). 
A quick search in Wikipedia will show you that they are cofounders of "The Spectator", but most interesting, if you click on the link for Joseph Addison in Google, you will be redirected to a page where a book by Thomas Burnet (1653?-1715), entitled "De statu mortuorum & resurgentium tractatus", translated in English by Matthias Earbery under the tile "Of the state of the dead and those that are to rise" (I would have translated this title slightly differently) appears in second place and is available on Google Book (apparently no American or European copyright lawyer pursued it that far back in time, or hell?): 

http://books.google.ch/books?id=A4NPAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA75&dq=inauthor:%22Joseph+Addison%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3rIkUbytEZH5sgbNooCYDQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

>From the title page you come to know that it is the second edition of this translation, dated 1728 and published in London. OCR has not been done on this book (for obvious reasons of typeface) so you will have to read it in full to see if it is relevant at all to the interesting question of knowing when the term "Indology" first appeared and why there is this 1765 mention in Google Ngram. It may finally turn out to be a bug due to the unavoidable 2% error on OCRs done by Google and others, but I suspect that there is, fortunately, more to it than a simple computational problem. 

One person who would be very interesting to consult in this matter is Urs App, one of the most - if not the most - prominent specialist on the history of the discovery of South and East Asian thinking and literary works by Europeans. I don't know if Urs is on this list, but if he is, we would be pleased to have his expert opinion on the matter.

Digitally yours,

Dr François Voegeli

Senior FNS Researcher
Institut d'Archéologie et des Sciences de l'Antiquité
Anthropole, bureau 4018
Faculté des Lettres
Université de Lausanne
CH-1015 Lausanne

On 19 févr. 2013, at 17:18, Malcolm Keating <c.malcolm.keating at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another Google resource is the Ngram viewer, which shows an instance of "Indology" in the English corpus as early as 1852 and 1854. Performing a Google Books search on this time period yields an instance in 1854, in "Types of Mankind: Or Ethnological Resources", selections from the papers of Samuel George Morton, M.D. published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co in Philadelphia. The pertinent passage is this:
> 
> "Indology" will protest against profaning the sanctified soil of Indra and Brahma with the mere "tail-race" of a Semitic pond, originally filled by the Nile! Shades of Wilford, Faber, Hales, and the spirit of Edgar Quinet! In Germany, appeal will at once be made to Van Bohlen! In Wales, to Arthur James Johnes, Esq! Does not everybody know, it will be said, that the primordial civilization (unceremoniously kicked out of Ethiopian Meroë by Lepsius,) first dawned upon the Ganges? that Memphis, (if not also Palenque and Copan,) received her holiest Penates at the hands of Siva, Vishnu, Bhairava, Crishna, or any other Indian deity a pundit might invent?
> 
> Ngram results: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Indology&year_start=1800&year_end=1900&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=
> Google book link: http://books.google.com/books?id=X2hAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA633&dq=%22Indology%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZqQjUf-2L6aFywGz2IGIBQ&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22Indology%22&f=false
> 
> Best,
> Malcolm
> 
> Malcolm Keating
> PhD Candidate, Philosophy
> University of Texas - Austin
> 
> http://sites.google.com/site/cmalcolmkeating

Dr François Voegeli

Senior FNS Researcher
Institut d'Archéologie et des Sciences de l'Antiquité
Anthropole, bureau 4018
Faculté des Lettres
Université de Lausanne
CH-1015 Lausanne

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