draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

1690s, and possibly added to or modified by Martín Iriarte in the early 1750s. Other than these
two missionaries, known for their Omagua linguistic ability, no clear candidates as contributors to
the Omagua texts emerge.
The survival of the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts is in certain respects surprising, since in
the latter phases of their explusion in 1767-8 the Maynas Jesuits destroyed most of the linguistic
descriptions and ecclesiastical materials that they had developed, in order that they not fall into
the hands of other religious orders (see Chapter 8 and footnote 5). The actual manuscripts that
have come down to us appear to have done so by three different routes. Although much about their
histories remains obscure, the Catechism Fragment’s survival appears to have centrally involved
Ignacio Franciscis, the survival of the Lord’s Prayer centrally involved Joaquín Camaño, and the
remaining texts appear to have been preserved by Manuel Uriarte.
As described in §5.1.1, the Catechism Fragment was published by González Suárez after a copy
of the manuscript was given to him as part of a collection of ecclesiastical texts uncovered in Quito.
Where this collection was discovered is unclear, but it may have been held in private hands. In
any case, Suárez identified the handwriting of the Catechism Fragment as Franciscis’, based on its
similarity to a document that he confidently identifies as written by Franciscis. Ignacio Franciscis
worked briefly in San Joaquín de Omaguas with Manuel Uriarte in 1761, and we deduce that he
copied a catechism text available there, and and brought it back to Quito, where he himself ended
up before the expulsion (see §5.1.1 and footnote 350). Franciscis is almost certainly not the author
of the catechism fragment, however, since he was in San Joaquín de Omaguas for only four months.
In fact, it appears, given the highly linguistically disparate nature of the ecclesiastical texts in his
handwriting in this collection, that Franciscis was actively collecting texts in different languages,
copying them wherever he found them.
The text of the Lord’s Prayer published by Hervás y Panduro was probably given to him by
Joaquín Camaño (see §4.1), who was one of Hervás y Panduro’s main sources for linguistic information
about South American languages (Clark 1937). Although Camaño never worked with
Omaguas, he was clearly quite knowledgeable about the language, suggesting that he had access to
materials on it. Where Camaño obtained the text is unknown at this point, but it is worth noting
that Camaño lived in Faenza, Italy subsequent to the expulsion (Fúrlong Cárdiff 1955:14-15), close
to Iriarte and Uriarte, who lived in nearby Ravenna (Bayle [1952]1986:82). As we discuss below,
it is clear that Uriarte preserved several texts, and may have given Camaño the copy of the Lord’s
Prayer. This might explain why this text does not appear in the appendix to Uriarte’s diaries.
The remaining ecclesiastical texts survived as part of the manuscript of Uriarte’s diaries, but it
is not entirely clear that Uriarte brought the texts back to Europe from Maynas. Uriarte claims to
have re-written his diaries in their entirety following the expulsion, since he supposedly destroyed
the original during the Jesuit expulsion, but he does explicitly indicate that he was able to smuggle a
single ecclesiastical text in Tikuna with him back to Italy (Uriarte [1776]1986:239). This latter text
forms part of the set of indigenous ecclesiastical texts found with his diary. It is curious, however,
that he mentions smuggling only the Tikuna text, and not any of the other manuscripts appearing
with his diary, raising the possibility that they may have been brought to Europe by others (e.g., by
Iriarte), and then bundled with the diary manuscript. It is possible, of course, that Uriarte re-wrote
the catechism from memory, but he presumably would not have been able to do so for the other
ecclesiastical texts bundled with his diary, meaning that these other texts must have found their
way to Europe by some means. We also doubt that the two catechism versions we compare in §9.4
would be so similar if Uriarte had rewritten the Full Catechism from memory after several years’
living in Italy, and some fifteen years after having ceased working with the Omaguas. In this light,
it is important to recall that someone, possibly Uriarte, provided Bazán with the grammatical and
lexical data that informed Hervás y Panduro’s and Gilii’s works, suggesting that some Jesuit or
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