Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [204]
Aymara, continuing to be spoken in the south of Peru and in what is now Bolivia (then the Audiencia of Charcas), underwent a kind of transfusion of vocabulary with Spanish: the many loans from Spanish were mostly for new Christian, or Western, ideas, but in some cases they were adapted to express traditional concepts: Wirjina (from Spanish virgen) and Santa Tira (from Spanish Santa Tierra, ‘holy land’) both came to stand for the Earth Mother (in Quechua Pachamama). In many other cases, Aymara words came to have Christian senses, as jucha, ‘sin’, in this short extract from an eighteenth-century sermon, where the Spanish borrowings are marked in bold:
Kamsta, cristiano? Janiti aka isapasina kharkatita? … P’arxtama, machaõa jucha jaytama, racionaljama, chuymanixama Diosana unaõchapajama jakaskama : janiki animal kankaõaru katuyasimti, janik sutiwisa kankaõaru katuyasimti: tukuxpana machaõa jucha, tukuxpana, munatanakay.
What do you say, Christian? Do you not tremble to hear this? … Awake, put off the sin of drunkenness. As a rational being, be sensible, live in the path which God marks out. Do not make yourself an animal. Don’t return to being something nameless. Make an end of the sin of drunkenness, make an end of it, beloved.44
Guaraní is the only indigenous American language that ultimately achieved permanent recognition as an official national language. Partly, the low penetration of Spanish in the early years may be due to the extreme remoteness of the Guaraní-speaking areas in the Americas, and the resulting lack of Spanish-speaking women to found Spanish-speaking families there. But the language mostly owes its resilience to the exemplary settlement by Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Their reducciones, communities founded as a holy and philanthropic reaction to the oppressive system of encomiendas* around Asunción, dominated relations between European and Indian in the period 1609-1767. The work was disrupted by raiding slavers (the dreaded ’mamelucos’) in 1628-40, and persistently by encomenderos. In the reducciones, all teaching was carried out in Guaraní, and the language thereby gained a very strong basis in Christianised culture. The utopian nature of the world so created by the Jesuits can be seen in the literal meaning of some of the new words that became current: îbîrayararusú, ‘master of the big stick’, i.e. chief constable; kuarepotí, ‘excrement of the mines’, i.e. money (something that had no use in the reducciones).,45
INKA YUPANKI: Akllaychis k’ iriykichista. Willaq-Umu, qan rimariy.
WILLAQ UMU: Nuqaman ancha khuyaqtan Inti sunqota qowarqan.
INKA YUPANKI: Rumi, qanõataq rimariy.
RUMI ŇAWI: Hatun huchaman chaninqa K’iri waõuypunin kanqa: Chaymi runataqa hark’ anqa Huchapakunanta, Inka…
INKA YUPANKI: Ňachu uyarirqankichisõa Takarpu kamarisqata. Chayman pusay kaykunata! Awqataqa sipiychisõa!… Paskaychis chay watasqata: Hatarimuy kay õawk’iyman! Qespinkin waõuyniykita: Kuman phaway, luychu k’ ita. Ňan urmamunki chakiyman: Kunanmi teqsi yachanqa Sunqoypa llanp’u kasqanta. Huqariqaykin qanta, Pachak kuti awqa mink’ a. Qanmi karqanki wanin’ ka Anti-suyu kamachikoq: Qanllataqmi kunan rikoq, Nuqaq munayniy kaqtinqa, Chaymi maykamapas rinqa: Anti-suyuta kamachiy, Wamink’ ay kapuy wiõaypaq…
An explicit motive in the Jesuits’ language regime was to protect Indians from European vices. But cultivation of the decent obscurity of a classical language, specifically Latin, was a policy widely pursued by the learned friars in the Americas, not least because they were aiming to found a native priesthood there. Some of the friars became enchanted by the achievements of their pupils in classical learning. Fray Toribio Motolinía, one of the twelve original Franciscan missionaries to Mexico, preserves this anecdote of the collapse