Volume 66, Issue 3

The codex Vocabulario enla Lengua Castellana, la del Inga y Xebera (British Library, shelf mark Ms. Add. 25,323), does not only contain a Spanish-Quechua-Xebero vocabulary, but also a rather elaborate description of certain Xebero sounds. Although the author of the manuscript is unknown, we may attribute it to the German-speaking Jesuit Samuel Fritz (1654-1726), who explored and lived in the Amazon between 1686 and 1723. Xebero is an indigenous North-Peruvian language and belongs to the Cahuapana language family, a small family consisting of two languages: Xebero and Chayahuita. Xebero is an agglutinative language and it has predominantly an SOV constituent (subject-object-verb) structure. In this paper we first analyze the sounds as described by the lexicographer in the manuscript and the graphemes used by him to symbolize them. On the basis of these data an overview of a tentative Xebero sound system is presented. Subsequently, we analyze the trilingual vocabulary in order to determine the roles played by the languages in the lexicon and to show the techniques used by the lexicographer in order to give an adequate translation of the different Spanish, Quechua and Xebero concepts.

This paper presents an analysis of the only remaining documentation of the Rokorona language, a collection of three prayers published in Teza (1868). First, a survey of the various mentions of Rokorona in the ethno-historical literature is presented, allowing for new insights into the original homeland of these people. Then, a number of phonological and grammatical features of the language are identified based on the texts. These features show that Rokorona displays a number of grammatical properties typical of Chapacuran languages, and when combined with the available lexical data, allow for the language to be definitively classified as such.

This article advocates the reanalysis of historical data on extinct languages in the view of our current knowledge on the grammatical characteristics of possibly related languages.The example given here is a corpus of eight Arawakan languages of Bolivia, of which four are already extinct (Apolista, Joaquiniano, Paikoneka, Saraveka). Even though there are only wordlists available for these extinct languages, it is possible to analyze the data in the light of Arawakan grammar.Those aspects that can be excerpted from all data are taken as typological features in a questionnaire used for phylogenetic analyses. The graphs that result from the feature analysis deliver evidence for certain relations between the languages and those that are still spoken today, which again gives us some idea about the migration of the Arawakan languages, in general.

The Lengua de los Llanos represents a hitherto unknown Yokuts tribal dialect which was used to produce a catechism for the first Yokuts converts missionized at Misión Santa Cruz. The authors are in the process of studying the dialect used in the catechism, which, despite the fact that it is clearly a subdialect of Northern Valley Yokuts, itself a dialect group forming part what could be called the Nuclear Valley Yokuts language, containing such well-described dialects as Yawlamni1 and Chukchansi, still contains sentences with words of uncertain meaning.

Nootka is an historical fur-trading centre in Yuquot, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. In 1788, the Spanish king Charles III sent an expedition to Nootka commanded by Ignacio Arteaga (1731-1783). A year later, Spain established a military post, San Lorenzo de Nutka, at Yuquot in 1789 which existed until 1795. The missionaries who arrived with the sailors were urged to learn the vernacular languages in order to evangelize. In chapter 5 of the Relación de la entrada de San Lorenzo de Nutka , the author copies a short vocabulary Spanish-Nutkeño (115 words) made by friar Lorenzo Socies (?-?) and another short vocabulary Spanish-Sandwich (more than 200 words) compiled by the same friar with the help of a Hawaiian boy, who had been under British Captain James Colnett’s (1753-1806) command but had joined the Spanish sailors during the British-Spanish dispute over Nootka. In this paper we will briefly describe the characteristics of these two vocabularies focusing on the entry words and context.