Giacinto Brusciotto

…and Italian was produced by Giacinto Brusciotto, also an Italian; however, material proof of the dictionary does not exist. In 1652 a 7,000-word dictionary of Kongo was produced, and in 1659 Brusciotto wrote the first grammatical analysis of Kongo. Brusciotto’s work is still praised for its accurate understanding of the…

…it was the work of Giacinto Brusciotto, an Italian missionary, who notably described the characteristic noun class system. Though several other vocabularies and grammatical sketches followed, that century and the next saw a rather sparse number of works on African languages. Only in the 19th century did a significant number…