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