Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [189]
First chinks in the language barrier:
Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians
General de Quesada tried to find out what people were arrayed against him. There was an Indian whom they had captured with two cakes of salt and who had led them to where they were in this realm, and who through conversation already spoke a few words of Spanish. The General had him ask some Indians of the country whom he had captured to serve as interpreters. They replied in their language with the words musca puenunga, which is the phrase for ‘many people’. The Spaniards who heard it said: ‘they say they are like flies [moscas]’… [Quesada] gave them a blast from the arquebuses. Then when the Indians saw that without coming up to them the Spaniards were killing them, without waiting a moment they took flight; our men gave chase and attacked them, until the great host came apart and disappeared. In the pursuit they say that the Spanish said: ‘There were more of these than flies; but they have taken flight like flies’; with which the name [Mosca] was fixed for them; and this assault finished off the whole war.
Juan Rodriguez Freyle, Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada,
ch. vi (written in 1636, describing events in the region of Bogotá in 1536)
Perhaps disappointed by the inadequate, because misguided, linguistic support he had brought on his first voyage, Columbus had kidnapped a handful of the people in his ships as he sailed onward around the islands he was exploring, and then taken them back to Spain. ‘It appeared to him that he should take to Castile, from this Isle of Cuba or the mainland as he was already reckoning it to be, some Indians so that they might learn the tongue of Castile and to know from them the secrets of the land, and in order to instruct them in the matters of the faith.’4
Several of them were presented at court, and received baptism, with royal godparents, no less. Most of them either died in Spain or took flight as soon as they returned to the Indies, and only one of them, now (after baptism) known as Diego Colón, did service as an interpreter. Columbus had at first been under the impression that all the ‘Indians’ he met spoke the same language; but the limited usefulness of Diego as he toured even the rest of the Caribbean islands gave him, first of the Europeans, an inkling of how diverse the language stock of these lands really was.
This kind of attempt to capture likely lads and train them up as interpreters was never a great success, although persisted with for thirty years or so. It caused resentment when candidates were taken by force—the native populations of Taino Indians already had bitter experience in their own culture of raids by neighbours for enslavement and human sacrifice—and far too often the apprentices died in the unnatural setting of life in Europe.
More effective was the natural process whereby an isolated Spaniard, shipwrecked or on the run from his own people, would take up life in an Indian village, and so get to know their language, before returning to act as interpreter. There are a good dozen such cases on record.5 One of these turned out to be crucial for the first Spanish advance into the interior of America, when in 1519 Cortés penetrated to the heart of the Mexican empire. He communicated through a relay of two interpreters, one of them Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had spent eight years in a Mayan village after a shipwreck on the coast of Yucatán, the other the famous Malin-tzin, a Nahuatl-speaking woman from Coatzacoalcos who had been traded to a nearby Mayan community, Xicalango, in childhood.
As interpreters of Spanish, many native