Chinchaysuyu Quechua and Amage confession manuals - Colonial language and culture contact in Central Peru

A volume of Andean indigenous linguistic materials which is kept in the British Library includes a Quechua and an Amage confession manual, written by the same hand and most probably dating from the eighteenth century, but possibly copied from earlier texts. Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz explains the context and manuscript history, makes an analysis of the most salient linguistic features of the Chinchaysuyu Quechua confession manual and presents its transcription. The Quechua text includes Central Peruvian Quechua lexical and morphological features, as opposed to what was the commonly used ‘general language’, a Southern Quechua variety. It also shows a tendency towards a media lengua (mixed language): the structure is entirely Quechua, but almost half of the words are relexified in Spanish. It reflects colonial power structures, but at the same time a certain intent at communicative pragmatism. It is probably the earliest documented example of a nascent variety of a mixed language in the Andes, and due to its inconsistent and unsystematic variations it is not unlike Spanglish. Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus provides a commented transcription and translation of the first Amage confession manual of two included in the manuscript volume. The Amage confession manual seems to be the earliest known text in the Amuesha (or Yanesha’) language, which belongs to the Arawakan language family, and is spoken to the east of the central Andes. Due to the lack of early colonial documentation of Amage, the understanding and analysis of the confession manual has to remain partly hypothetical. With respect to contact phenomena, the text uses a number of loanwords from Quechua and Spanish. Some of the Quechua words may have been borrowed via Christian texts where the Quechua words had already been re-semanticised; others may be older, such as the numbers from ‘six’ to ‘nine’; a few words reflect the economic character of the relationship of the Amages and the Spanish-speaking population

"Escenarios plausibles": Hacia la construcción del pasado (Estudio de caso de Chucuito a fines del siglo XIX)

The present paper shows that, parting from a multiperspectival approach to microhistory, it is possible to construct the past in form of ‘plausible scenarios’. This type of analysis is illustrated with data and their interpretation from big landowners – peasant conflicts in Southern Peru at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century.La presente contribución muestra que –partiendo de un acercamiento multiperspectivista hacia la microhistoria– es posible construir el pasado en forma de "escenarios plausibles". Se ilustra este tipo de análisis con datos y su interpretación sobre conflictos entre latifundistas y campesinos del sur del Perú en la época del cambio del siglo XIX al XX

“¿Sueles decir al hechicero: ‘Adivina para mí’?” – Funcionalidad gramatical en las traducciones al quechua de cinco confesionarios coloniales

The 16th and 17th centuries colonial Quechua Peruvian confession manuals are testimonies of the translation efforts of Spanish missionaries who had become fluent and knowledgeable in the native language. Complementing existing analyses of some semantic fields, this contribution aims at studying how they translated Spanish grammar into Quechua. This will be exemplified by using sentences from the first and sixth commandments and centre on the transmission of tense and indirect speech as well as other grammatical and syntactic challenges. After presenting the history of the origin and composition of the five confessionaries I will, embedded in the field of Translation Studies, approach the functionality of the translations, the translators’ (in)visibility as well as domestication vs. foreignisation. It becomes evident that, although no clear translation strategies or consistencies within certain religious orders can be found and the translators are not always visible, the authors/translators had a good understanding of the Quechua language, which becomes particularly clear in their awareness of morphology and syntax. This led to a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in the Spanish original. Translation nuances reveal the authors’/translators’ familiarity with complex structures.Los confesionarios quechuas del Perú colonial son un testimonio de los intentos por traducir de los misioneros lingüistas españoles que habían llegado a ser fluidos y ‘lenguaraces’ en la lengua nativa. Complementando análisis existentes de algunos campos semánticos, esta contribución va a estudiar cómo traducían la gramática castellana al quechua. Voy a ejemplificar esto mediante algunas oraciones del primer y sexto mandamiento, centrándome en la transmisión de los tiempos verbales y en el habla indirecta así como en otros retos gramaticales. Siguiendo la presentación de la historia del origen y la composición de cinco confesionarios voy a acercarme a la funcionalidad de las traducciones, la (in)visibilidad de los traductores y la domesticación vs. extranjerización. Es evidente que –aunque no se pueden encontrar estrategias de traducción o consistencias dentro de ciertas órdenes religiosas y que los traductores no son siempre visibles– los autores/traductores tenían una buena comprensión del quechua: esto se revela claramente en su sensibilidad en cuanto a la morfología y sintaxis, lo cual llevó a un grado más alto de gramaticalización que en el original castellano. Los matices en las traducciones muestran la familiaridad de los autores con estructuras complejas

Idolatría y sexualidad: Métodos y contextos de la transmisión y traducción de conceptos cristianos en los confesionarios ibéricos y coloniales de los siglos XVI-XVIII. Introducción al dossier

Introducción al dossier.Introduction to the Dossier.Introducción al dossie