draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

conclusion to be drawn from the historical materials describing the development of ecclesiastical
texts, namely, that the ecclesiastical texts were not produced by a single author at a single point
in time, but instead successively re-worked and polished as part of a communal text tradition. The
two catechisms are overwhelmingly similar, but show a variety of subtle differences in the words
or grammatical constructions employed to express a given notion, which points to contributions
by different individuals. Perhaps the best evidence for the involvement of different individuals,
however, is that the contributors to the different texts exhibit different masteries of Old Omagua
grammar. Although the contributors to both texts exhibit significant knowledge of the language,
the contributors to the Full Catechism, for example, show mastery of the subtle distinction between
reason and purpose interrogative words, while the contributors to the Catechism Fragment conflate
this distinction, resorting in all cases to reason interrogatives. In contrast, the contributors to the
Catechism Fragment generally ordered pre-nominal modifiers correctly, while the contributors to
the Full Catechism inverted the correct order on a number of occasions.
This work also sought to narrow down the likely contributors to the ecclesiastical texts, identifying
Samuel Fritz and Manuel Iriarte as probably having been important in the communal text
tradition in which the Old Omagua texts were embedded. A great deal is unknown about the details
of these contributions, however, and the precise means by which these texts survived the destruction
of Jesuit linguistic descriptions and ecclesiastical texts during the expulsion remains unclear.
This work represents a first exploration of the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts analyzed here, and
they no doubt have much more to tell us, both about the language in which they were written, and
the circumstances and manner in which they were created. Even this initial foray, however, shows
us that the long-neglected texts created by the Jesuits of Maynas constitute invaluable linguistic
and historical resources.
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