Ernest Trumpp

Ernest Trumpp (13 March 1828 – 5 April 1885) was a Christian missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society. He was also German professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Munich and a philologist. With an intent to convert the populace of western un-divided India to Christianity, he was seconded and sent to the Sindh and Punjab region (British India). He first came to India in the 1850s and published scholarly work on the Sindhi and other western subcontinental languages. He also worked to translate the Sikh scriptures to help Christian missionaries to understand Sikhs and thereby aid their conversion.

He authored the first Sindhi grammar entitled ''Sindhi Alphabet and Grammar''. He also published ''Grammar of Pashto, or language of the Afghans, compared with the Iranian and North Indian idioms''.

One of his controversial works was based on an 8-year study of the Sikh scriptures, where he attempted to philologically analyze and translate a significant portion of the Guru Granth Sahib into English in the 1870s. Trumpp was limited in his knowledge of sub-continent languages to a few that he had studied, while the Granth Sahib was composed using multiple languages of the South Asia region. Hence, numerous discrepancies appear in his partial translations, which were rejected by the mainstream Sikhs. Many observers of the faith (Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims) regarded his introductory remarks to his translation as "extremely offensive". According to the Indologist Mark Juergensmeyer, criticism of Trumpp's translation was also, in part, due to discussions only with Nirmala Sikhs and not with mainstream Sikh scholars. However, setting aside Ernest Trumpp's nasty remarks, he was a German linguistic and his years of scholarship, translations, as well as field notes and discussions have been used by contemporary scholars with caution. Provided by Wikipedia