Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [205]
A very fine thing happened to a priest recently arrived from Castile, who could not believe that the Indians knew Christian doctrine, nor the Lord’s Prayer, nor the Creed; and when other Spaniards told him they did, he remained sceptical; just then two students had come out of class, and the priest thinking they were from the rest of the Indians, asked one of them if he knew the Lord’s Prayer and he said he did, and he made him say it, and then he made him say the Creed, and the student said it perfectly well; and the priest challenged one word which the Indian had got right, and since the Indian asserted that he was right, and the priest denied it, the student had to ask what was the correct way, and asked him in Latin: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est?† Then since the priest did not know grammar, he was left quite at a loss, covered with confusion.46
In some places, the Spanish spread the lenguas generales beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake Atitlán means ‘round the water’, or as they put it in the local Tz’utujil, chi-nim-ya’, ‘by the great water’; Guatemala itself is Quauh-temal-lan, ‘tree-infection-place’, translating the Mayan expression k’i-chee’ (still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from… tenan-co, ’ in the citadel of … ’ : Quetzaltenango, ’ in the citadel of the quetzal bird’, Huehuetenango, ‘in the old citadel’, Momostenango, ‘in the citadel of the chapel’, Chichicastenango, ‘in the citadel of the bitter nettle’. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacán (Nahuatl Michuahkan ‘place of those who have fish’), which had never been part of the Aztec domains.47
In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest.48 The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tucumán area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvées (mit’ a) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosí area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and mestizos; and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the lengua general, and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it.* By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tucumán had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region.49
The state’s solution: Hispanización
The ministers of the church who do not attempt to advance and extend the Castilian language and take care that the Indians know how to read and write in it, leaving them