draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

tanu= eu =mai ne= yume ikume tanu= =supe
1pl.excl.ms= eat =inact.nomz 2sg= give today 1pl.excl.ms= =goal
close: ‘You give us our food today.’
target: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’
The first line, (3.1a), reproduces the text from the published source from which it was extracted
without any alteration (except, possibly, the insertion of a sentence break, as discussed above). It
should be noted that this line, although it faithfully reproduces the text in the published source, 106
no doubt contains significant errors in comparison to the original manuscripts (to which we do
not have access). These errors are likely due to the fact that at least one step in the process of
reproducing the manuscripts involved individuals who had little or no knowledge of Omagua. The
result was misinterpretations on the part of the the individuals involved of the handwriting in earlier
manuscripts, and widespread errors in identifying word boundaries. There is a particular tendency,
for example, to confuse the graphemes and ; and ; and ; and
and . We discuss the issues involved in the interpretation
The second line, (3.1b), consists of a grouping of the graphemes given in (3.1a) such that they
form coherent grammatical words words, without in any way changing the graphemes. This often
involves combining sets of graphemes that are grouped as distinct “words” in (3.1a), and in some
cases splitting up such “words”. This rearrangement of word breaks is most striking in the Full
Catechism, where it is common for roots to be split up as separate words. This suggests to us
large-scale misinterpretation of the manuscript handwriting on the part of a copyist who did not
speak Omagua, in the centuries preceding publication (see also footnote 112).
The third line, (3.1c), represents our informed interpretation and phonemic rendering of the
actual words in the original manuscript. In most cases, this interpretation and rendering is straightforward,
since Omagua phonology has changed little since the 17 th century, and the relationship
between the words in (3.1b) and the intended ones is clear, even when scribal errors have crept into
the published texts. Our phonemic representations in this line are thus usually identical to that of
the corresponding forms in the modern language. When we find it necessary to insert segments in
this line in order to arrive at an intelligible morpheme, we enclose the segments in parentheses, and
when we find it necessary to excise letters for the same reason, we enclose them in square brackets.
The fourth line, following (3.1c), is a morphological segmentation of the previous line, while the
fifth line consists of a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss of the preceding line. If the example includes
more than one sentence, each sentence will begin on a new line here.
The sixth through eighth lines consist of three translations of the preceding Omagua text, labeled
close, target and spanish. The close translation is our relatively literal, but possibly
awkward, translation of the preceding Omagua text. The target translation consists of our interpretation
of the Jesuit authors’ intended meaning of the Omagua prose in the example, based on
our understanding of the intended theological message and symbolism. The most notable contrast
between these two lines involves Jesuit neologisms (see §??) and calques (see §9.3.2), which are
translated literally in the close translation line, but with standard Christian terms in the target
translation. In cases where only a close translation line is given, we consider it to be equivalent to
a target translation.
The spanish translation is given only in cases in which the published source provides a translation
of some sort. In the case of the Full Catechism, these Spanish translations correspond to those
106 Note that in some cases, there is more than one published version of a given text, and there are inconsistencies
between the various versions. In the case of the three versions of the Uriarte catechism (see §6.1), there is no
variation between Uriarte ([1776]1952a:229-232) and Uriarte ([1776]1986:614-617)), but there is variation beetween
the text in these publications and Espinosa Pérez (1935:155-163).
55