draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

and explicitly advises the training of young children as interpreters in a series of directives he writes
for future missionaries:
...con los niños especialmente, que son la esperanza, poner todo empeño, haciéndose
querer de ellos, atrayendo los que se pueda a su casa y ocupándolos en aprender la
doctrina y lenguas para ser después intérpretes, varayos, capitanes, fiscales, etc...
(Uriarte [1776]1986:223, emphasis ours) 357
9.2.4 Ecclesiastical Text Development and Use
The ecclesiastical texts were central to continuity in evangelical practices in the Jesuit reducciones,
both in maintaining uniformity in the texts that Catholic practice demanded that its adherents
commit to memory, and also in aiding newly-arrived priests quickly to attain sufficient competence
to carry out basic evangelical activities. Manuel Uriarte ([1776]1986:192), for example, notes that
upon his arrival in 1754 in San Pablo de Napeanos, an Iquito and Masamae reducción on the lower
Nanay River, he found a variety of ecclesiastical texts in Iquito, Yameo and Quechua, which were
written by his predecesor José Bahamonde (b. 1710 Quito – d. 1786 Ravenna), 358 and it is clear
that the availability of these resources were invaluable in both learning to speak the local languages
and in carrying out evangelical work in them (see also Chantre y Herrera (1901:485)). And as
Chantre y Herrera (1901:637) observes, the availability of translated ecclesiastical texts allowed the
missionaries to adapt their linguistic choices to the communities in which they worked:
...y si eran varios [i.e. the languages used in the community], [the priest held mass] en
la principal y más común según el padre juzgaba más conveniente, porque en todas las
lenguas que eran muchas tenían los misioneros sus traducciones. 359
It is ecclesiastical texts of this type that are the empirical focus of this volume, and the purpose of
this section is clarify how these critical resources in the Jesuit project in Maynas were developed. The
key point we make with respect to this issue is that the development of these texts is most accurately
conceived of as a communal and collaborative endeavor, both among concurrently active missionaries
and speakers of indigenous languages who shared knowledge of a given language, but also through
time, as successive generations of missionaries sought to improve and clarify the ecclesiastical texts
that came down to them.
It is clear that in developing the first versions of ecclesiastical texts in lenguas particulares,
the Maynas Jesuits typically relied on multilingual individuals to translate a version in the lengua
particular from an extant Quechua text. D’Etre, for example, describes the development of the first
357 Translation (ours):
...especially with the children, who are our hope, make every effort, endearing them, attracing those
one can to one’s house and occupying them with learning the doctrine and languages to later become
interpreters, varayos, captains, fiscales [lay church positions], etc...
358 (Jouanen 1943:726)
359 Translation (ours):
...and if there were several [i.e. languages used in the community], [the priest taught] in the main and
most common [language], as the father found convenient, because in all the languages, and they were
numerous, the missionaries had translations [i.e. of the ecclesiastical texts].
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