Ernest Trumpp

Ernest Trumpp (13 March 1828 – 5 April 1885) was a German philologist and missionary to Sindh Province, Punjab Province, and Peshawar, which were all part of what was British India before the independence of Pakistan in 1947.
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, and translated most of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred scripture of the Sikhs, into English.

Biography

Trumpp was born on 13 March 1828 at Ilsfeld in Wurtemberg Province (now Baden-Württemberg) in Germany. As a young man he migrated to London as a consequence of political upheaval, and found employment as an assistant librarian at the East India House (later known as India Office), headquarters of British East India Company.

Around 1854 he arrived in India as a missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society to study the languages of India and to prepare grammars and glossaries for use by Christian missionaries. There he was initially stationed at the Karachi mission, where he learnt the Sindhi language. Later, he was stationed at Peshawar, where he studied the Pashto language. He went back to Germany in 1860, and was subsequently summoned to return to work in the Subcontinent on translations of Sikh scripture in Lahore.

He returned to Württemberg in 1871, and in 1874 began working as a professor of Oriental languages in Munich.