Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [210]
* ‘… they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians.’ Columbus, Diario de a bordo, Friday, 12 October 1492, quoted by De las Casas (1957 [c. 1530]). Columbus had at first thought he was within the domain of the Chinese Great Khan, and then (12 November) amid ‘the islands of India’. He no longer called the people he met indios after mid-December of that year, but the name had stuck (Sale 1990: 109).
† ‘… These islands are inhabited by Canabilli, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh… ’ Letter of Guillermo Coma, De insulis meridiani … nuper inventis, on Columbus’s second voyage, for Sunday, 3 November 1493.
* Columbus’s world-view was informed by copious reading. We have seven of his books with his personal annotations, preserved to this day in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. They include works of Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and others more fanciful. His son Fernando also gave an account of his father’s reading, in chs 6 and 7 of his biography (Sale 1990: 15).
* Although the contacts over the first few centuries always involved the projection of the mariners’ languages on to the peoples who received their landfalls, more recently we have seen that the new links can work in both directions, as immigrant communities from colonised countries gather in the homelands of once colonial powers, bringing their own languages with them.
* The word ’ladino’, indeed, carried over from its application to Moors in Spain, was a term often used of non-Spaniards who knew Spanish, first applied to Indians but later also to African slaves.
* The people in Hispaniola, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands, discovered in the previous generation, and immediately pressed into servitude by self-appointed Spanish masters, had spoken too many languages with too few speakers, and by and large died off too quickly, for a missionary effort to become established.
† On the uniqueness of this, see Ostler (2004). Almost all the dictionaries are from Spanish into the alien language, not the reverse. The aim is to teach, rather than to learn: to encode a Spaniard’s thought, and so pass it to the Indians, rather than to try to decode anything novel that they might have to say.
§ Lengua mexicana refers to the Nahuatl language, the principal lingua franca of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, and at first also of its successor empire, New Spain.
* Other than to misidentify some phrases in it, and apply them permanently to the lands he was ‘discovering’ (and of course claiming in the name of the Spanish Crown). Ekab kotoc, ‘we are from Ekab’, became Cabo (cape) Cotoche, its name to this day. And, if we follow Diego de Landa (Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, ch. ii, written c.1566), ciu yetel ceh than, ‘They call it land of turkeys and deer’, ended up as ‘Yucatán’.
* Guaraní is so called for historical reasons, because the first people whom Europeans (with Sebastian Cabot in 1526-9) met who spoke this language were the Guaraní of the islands in the Río de la Plata and lower reaches of the Paraná. Its own preferred name is avaõe’e, ‘language of the men of the plain’.
* The name is a nominalisation of the verb nawati, ‘to speak up’. We shall stick to the conventional spelling of this name, which is based on Spanish, and so pronounced nawatl. There are dialects, often called Nawat and Nawal, which (as their names show) differ in the pronunciation of this final consonant.
* The x is authentically pronounced as English sh, and the stress falls on the i, followed by a glottal stop: Mēšíhko.
† The dates quoted are actually specified with equivalent accuracy in the original text of the Crónica Mexicayotl. The many different peoples of central America shared an elaborate system of interlocking calendar cycles which tolerated no vagueness, even if not always compatible with one another.
* The phraseology is very similar