draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

A somewhat different process of semantic extension affected the word ayaise ‘wicked’ in the
Lord’s Prayer, which both in modern Omagua and the other ecclesiastical texts, predicates negative
personality attributes like dishonesty or a propensity for anger or violence to people. In the Lord’s
prayer, however, we find the word being used more broadly to indicate a notion like ‘bad, evil’, which
can also be predicated of inanimates. We take the extension from ‘wicked’ to ‘evil’ to be a result
of Jesuit authors’ searching for an antonym to eRa ‘good’, which can be predicated of animates,
inanimates, and even events, indicating general positive evaluation, without the kind of restriction
to personality attributes we see for ayaise ‘wicked’. No such antonym exists as a single lexical item
in modern Omagua at least, leading us to believe that ayaise was used in the Lord’s Prayer in a
way that extended the native semantics of the term. 377
(9.18) ayaise maRaisui neyumunuyepeta tanu
ayaise maRai =sui ne= yumunuyepeta tanu
wicked thing =abl 2sg= save 1pl.excl.ms
‘Deliver us from evil.’
(see (4.7))
Finally we consider the use of kumesa ‘say’ as a translational equivalent of ‘judge’ in the Full
Catechism, as in (9.19). Modern Omagua exhibits no word that expresses the notion of ‘judgment’ in
a moral, legal, or eschatological sense, and it is clear that elsewhere in the Old Omagua ecclesiastical
texts kumesa serves to express ‘say’, as in the modern language. We infer, then, that kumesa
meant ‘say’ in Old Omagua, and that the Jesuits extended the term to ‘judge’ in the ecclesiastical
texts. The precise motivation for this extension is obscure, but it is worth noting that in both
modern Loreto Spanish and in several Peruvian Amazonian languages, decir ‘say’ and its indigenous
counterparts often carry the connotation of ‘criticize’ (although this is not the case for modern
Omagua), 378 a notion not that distant from ‘judge’. If this secondary sense was also salient in the
region when the ecclesiastical texts were being developed, it may have served as a motivation for
extending the meaning of kumesa ‘say’. This extension may of course be wholly a Jesuit innovation,
grounded in the notion of judgement as a speech act, or on the idea that to speak of wicked deeds
is to reveal them, thereby making them objects of possible moral censure.
(9.19) upakatu yenesawakai upai ayaise yeneyaw1k1maipuRakana weRanu Rakumesasenuni RauRiaRi.
upa =katu yene= sawa =kai upai ayaise yene= yaw1k1 =mai
all =intsf 1pl.incl= soul =? every wicked 1pl.incl= do =inact.nomz
=puRa =kana weRanu Ra= kumesa =senuni Ra= uRi =aRi
=nom.pst =pl.ms coord 3sg.ms= say =purp 3sg.ms= come =impf
‘He will come to judge all of our souls and all of our wicked deeds.’
(see (6.25b))
Finally, we consider a strategy employed in the Lord’s Prayer for expressing passive voice, that
relies on extending the function of the third person masculine pronoun to a non-referential role. This
strategy is exemplified in (9.9) in §9.3.2.1. The construction, tene Ra= mutSa muRa lit. ‘let him kiss
it’, which aims to translate a jussive passive in the corresponding Spanish sentence (i.e. sanctificado
sea tu nombre ‘hallowed be thy name’ = ‘let his name be hallowed’), involves a transitive active verb.
377 See footnote 146 for additional comments.
378 See sawata ‘criticize’.
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