On the Linguistic Ideas Underlying the Work of 16th-Century Mesoamerican Missionaries

Abstract

Summary The purpose of these pages is to present the set of ideas regarding language and languages on which the work of the linguist missionaries was based. A corpus of works written in Mesoamerica, most of them in the 16th century, was selected, and authors and works of the Nahuatl, Purépecha and Zapotec linguistic traditions are examined. For the analysis of the texts, a historiographic approach was used that emphasizes the importance of the agent (the linguist missionary) in linguistic production and the epistemological importance of the phenomena of transtextuality, focussing particularly on the study of the authorial paratext of grammars and dictionaries. The analysis of the ideas of a general nature on language and the assessment of the indigenous languages that is induced from these ideas, documented in the texts that are analysed, leads to the establishment of a series of criteria shared by the missionaries that are presented, as a concluding statement, with their main arguments. The sources of these arguments are, above all, certain passages from the Bible, in particular texts of Saint Paul that the linguist missionaries cite and comment on repeatedly. They are further supported by biblical images that are used in a metaphorical sense and, occasionally, by historical figures that are presented as examples.

Los ejemplos en las artes de la lengua quechua (siglos XVI-XVIII): primera aproximación

“…Esta disciplina también se ha ocupado de la edición crítica de gramáticas o vocabularios (la colección Lingüística misionera de Iberoamericana/Vervuert y las reproducciones facsímiles de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional) o del estudio de las fuentes y las repercusiones de esta producción en el pensamiento lingüístico español (Zwartjes 2000). Otras investigaciones se han centrado en el agente en la producción lingüística misionera (Esparza Torres 2015 o han puesto de relieve que el estudio de los elementos paratextuales de estas obras conlleva una comprensión más profunda de las mismas (Esparza Torres 2005, Cancino Cabello 2017, Segovia Gordillo 2020a. Igualmente, en otros trabajos se han ido perfilando los presupuestos teóricos de la historiografía de la lingüística misionera (Zimmermann 2004, Hernández 2013 3 .…”