Volume 67, Issue 2 - A colonized world revisited: linguistic perspectives from unpublished colonial and postcolonial documents

With his Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (ca. 1535–post 1616), the best known Andean early-17th century author of indigenous descent, created a comprehensive and complex work about the indigenous past and the colonial present of his time. Colonial language data and information in an Amerindian language, interpreted from within the writer's framework as well as parting from Andean and European traditions, can be used to better understand the author's objectives for employing a certain text genre and language. This paper gives a sociolinguistic and ethno-historical analysis of Guaman Poma's work. Guaman Poma uses animal imagery of wild beasts in order to portray colonial society. Certain functionaries are likened to animals which threaten the indigenous people. The critical author presents these menaces in two sections of his work: in a critique of the administration which contains an illustration that links wild animals and functionaries directly and explicitly, and through prayers seeking protection from these same threats. Making use of symbolic language, textual and visual imagery, Guaman Poma associates uncivilized elements of nature with the barbaric behavior of the authorities. Nature and culture have always been closely linked in the Andes, and Guaman Poma makes extensive traditional and at the same time creative use of this connection. I argue that in doing so he creates a new colonial indigenous discourse and uses subversion in the repressive context of the time to call the attention of the reader to the social problems created by colonial rule, thereby making an innovative use of both his native language and Spanish traditions.

In this paper, I will describe and discuss the extinct Uru variety of Ch'imu/Lake Titicaca (Peru), as documented by the German researcher Walter Lehmann (1878–1939). To this purpose, I will compare the Ch'imu Uru to the closely related varieties of Irohito Uru and Chipaya (both Bolivia), relying on archival material and previous studies. The topics I will take into consideration include phonological and etymological features as well as grammatical markers and constructions, such as e.g. personal and possessive pronouns and negation. Based on the findings of my investigation, I will critically discuss the utility of Lehmann's Ch'imu data for further research.

Henri Henrikhovitch Manizer (1889–1917) was a Russian ethnographer and linguist who spent six months among the Botocudo people from the Southeastern region of Brazil in the beginning of the twentieth century. His research was the result of a Russian expedition through South America in 1915. Manizer was the first researcher who was able to write down the Botocudo language with the most developed method of his time: the International Phonetic Alphabet transcription (Sebestyén 1981). Although many ethnographers had visited the Botocudo people before him, the material he collected is in many aspects of great value but it still remains unexplored both by linguists. This material includes bilingual Botocudo-Portuguese tales: a bilingual dictionary, articles and notes on the Botocudo grammar and culture, and a description of his impressions of the group. In spite of the good quality of the data, still many problems can be reported, such as the variations registered in the language transcriptions, the difficulties in transcribing some phonetic sounds (like voiceless nasals and contour segments, for example), the translation into Portuguese, problems with comprehension of the morphological and syntactic aspects, and cultural barriers (Seki 1984, 1985, 2001, 2004). In this paper, we aim to show our current research on this matter and present some of the partial results of this investigation based on the linguistic data by Manizer. We found out that our synchronical study of the phonology of the Krenak language, the only language of the Botocudo group which is still alive, leads to a better understanding of this old material, although there will remain still some unanswered questions. It enables us to formulate some hypotheses on what may have happened to the language and, maybe, to predict and understand its changes through time. As a result, we shall be able to work with this old material and make it available for both scholars and speakers of the language.

Like so many other languages in Spanish South America, Guarani, as spoken in the 17th and 18th centuries, is documented in grammars, dictionaries, and catechisms. These texts were primarily written for priests as tools of basic communication with the indigenous population. The Jesuit system of Reductions (protected Indian villages), however, led language learners to face other language uses beyond the elementary level. To teach these, other texts were created, such as the one presented in this paper that deals with the translation of a booklet on the early history of the Guarani Reductions. Its pedagogical features, together with its descriptive significance for our grasp of the language used, will be explained. A close examination of both the old grammars and contemporary texts will lead to a clearer understanding of the constitutive particularities of the language.

In this article I show three methods to use the Negerhollands computer corpus for a better understanding of the eighteenth century variety of Negerhollands. The first one is the study of metalinguistic comments which are taken up in several manuscripts. The second method is stemma/variety research between and within texts with the same content. The third method to study the do's and doubts of the first translators in order to present the right variety of the language is the analysis of annotations, changes and erasures of the writers. This philological approach was common in Medieval studies, for instance, but is hardly used with respect to Creole languages.