draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

such as Günter Tessmann (1930:47-66) were proclaiming the imminent extinction of the Omagua. 10
As of the writing of the present work, the authors are aware of fewer than ten speakers of Omagua,
living in San Joaquín de Omaguas, Peru, and in the nearby urban center of Iquitos. The youngest
of these speakers was born in 1936.
Interactions between Christian missionaries and the development of Omagua ecclesiastical materials
date to the 1621 expedition to the Omaguayeté settlements of the Aguarico River, a tributary
of the upper Napo River, by the Jesuits Simón de Rojas and Humberto Coronado, and a lay priest,
Pedro Limón (Newsom 1996). During this visit they prepared an Omagua catechism with the aid
of a bilingual Quechua-Omagua translator (Maroni [1738]1988:214-217), but the Jesuits did not
maintain a stable presence among the Omaguayeté, and following increasing tensions and violence
involving the Omaguas and representatives of the colonial government, the Omaguayeté abandoned
the Aguarico area and resettled on the Tiputini River, another tributary of the Napo located further
downriver, and further from the centers of Spanish colonial power. The ultimate fate of the Rojas
and Coronado catechism remains unknown.
A lengthy hiatus in Jesuit missionary activity among the Omagua followed the flight of the
Omaguayeté, and was broken only in 1685 when Samuel Fritz arrived in the Omagua settlements
along the Amazon proper. 11 As described in detail in Chapter 9, Fritz was successful in creating
numerous reducciones (mission settlements) and within a few years had developed his own Omagua
catechism. Fritz’s work inaugurated a period lasting until the Jesuit expulsion in 1767 of intensive
work on developing and rewriting a variety of Omagua ecclesiastical texts, the known exemplars
of which are analyzed in this volume, as well as a number of grammars and dictionaries, which
unfortunately remain lost.
The analysis of the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts presented here forms part of larger project,
based at the University of California, Berkeley and led by Lev Michael, to document and describe
Omagua, and to better understand its linguistic history. The analysis of the texts given in this work
is based on several seasons of fieldwork with Omagua speakers, 12 and a detailed analysis of Omagua
grammar (Michael et al. in prep). Our analysis of the Old Omagua texts has also benefited from the
parallel Comparative Tupí-Guaraní Project, which has facilitated the identification of morphemes
and constructions in the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts for which counterparts can be found in
other Tupí-Guaraní languages, despite their absence from modern Omagua. And not least, our
analysis of these texts has been informed by the ongoing collaborative reconstruction of Proto-
Omagua-Kokama, involving the authors, Rosa Vallejos Yopán and Vivian Wauters (Wauters and
O’Hagan 2011; O’Hagan and Wauters 2012; O’Hagan et al. 2013, in prep).
The present work continues in Chapter 2 with a grammatical sketch of Old Omagua. The purpose
of the sketch is two-fold: first, to allow readers to critically evaluate our analysis of the ecclesiastical
texts and the translations we provide; and second, to facilitate the comparison of Old Omagua to
modern Omagua. In Chapter 3 we present the representational conventions we follow in our analysis
of the Jesuit ecclesiastical texts, and provide a discussion of certain recurrent characteristics of the
Jesuit texts, such as calques. In Chapters 4–7 we present our analysis of each of the ecclesiastical
texts. At the beginning of each chapter we provide a bibliographical history of the relevant text,
10 Nevertheless, as late as the middle 1950s, Girard (1958:163-185) was able to record significant ethnographic information
on the Omagua of Peru.
11 A Franciscan expedition departing from Quito and led by the Franciscan priest Laureano de la Cruz spent 17
months among the Omagua living on the Amazon River proper betwen 1647 and 1649, but this expedition did
not engage in missionary activities or the preparation of Omagua ecclesiastical texts (Myers (1992:133),de la Cruz
([1653]1900)).
12 These include two months of fieldwork by Edinson Huamancayo Curí in 2004, one month of fieldwork by Brianna
Grohman in 2006, two months of fieldwork in 2010 by Zachary O’Hagan, Clare Sandy, Tammy Stark, and Vivian
Wauters, and two months of fieldwork in 2011 by Zachary O’Hagan and Clare Sandy.
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