I studied German in high school and then as an adult I traveled to India and studied Malayalam, the language of the southern-most state of Kerala. I was surprised at how similar Malayalam was to German (in terms of grammatical structure, not vocabulary) and learned that it’s because of Hermann Gundert, a 19th Century German missionary who learned Malayalam (and a bunch of other Indian languages) and published its first formal grammar, more-or-less imposing German’s grammatical structure onto it.