draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 1
Introduction
Ecclesiastical texts written in indigenous South American languages are among the oldest sources
of data on these languages, allowing us insight into their grammars and lexicons as they existed
centuries before modern documentation and description began to be carried out. The data provided
by such ecclesiastical texts, which run the gamut from prayers to catechisms, is especially valuable
in cases where the historical development of the language is a focus of research, as is the case
for Omagua, the language treated here. Omagua, like its closely-related sister language Kokama-
Kokamilla (Vallejos Yopán 2010a), has long puzzled linguists, as it exhibits numerous Tupí-Guaraní
traits, but is also relatively grammatically and lexically divergent from other Tupí-Guaraní languages.
This has led to a provocative hypothesis, advanced by Cabral (1995, 2007) and Cabral and
Rodrigues (2003), that Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla are in fact creole languages that developed
in the Jesuit reducciones (mission settlements) of the Gobierno de Maynas 1 during the late 17th and
early 18th centuries. Whatever the ultimate status of this hypothesis, it is clear that Omagua and
Kokama-Kokamilla are of significant comparative interest from the wider Tupí-Guaraní perspective,
due to how they differ from other Tupí-Guaraní languages.
Ecclesiastical texts like those studied in this volume are also valuable historical documents
that, together with contemporary descriptions of misisonary linguistic and evangelical practices,
provide us the opportunity to better understand how colonial-era missionaries – in the Omagua
case, Jesuits – engaged with indigenous languages. Ecclesiastical texts served as crucial tools to
mitigate the difficulties posed by the tremendous linguistic diversity of Amazonia, and formed part
of a sophisticated linguistic policy that combined descriptive linguistic research, the maintenance of
archives of linguistic materials, and a broader effort to promote Quechua as a lengua general in the
Amazonian lowlands. A close examination of the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts, and descriptions
of how similar texts were developed, also reveals that ecclesiastical texts were, in a significant sense,
communally created objects, with different missionaries successively modifying the texts.
The principal purpose of the present work is to bring together for the first time all four known
ecclesiastical texts produced in Old Omagua, the 17th- and 18th-century predecessor to modern
Omagua, 2 and to provide a linguistically informed analysis of these texts. The goal in doing so is to
render these texts suitable for further linguistic analysis, especially for comparative analysis aimed
at clarifying the relationship of Omagua to other Tupí-Guaraní languages.
The texts analyzed in this work consist of: 1) a version of the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster); 2)
a short fragment of one catechism; 3) a complete version of a second catechism; and 4) a Profession
1 The colonial-era Gobierno de Maynas corresponds roughly to the present-day Department of Loreto in Peru.
2 Old Omagua is sufficiently different from modern Omagua, especially in terms of the preservation of Tupí-Guaraní
morphology lost in the modern language, that a distinct name is useful to distinguish from the modern language.
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