Juan Antonio Frago Gracia
Departamento de Lingüística General e Hispánica, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009, Zaragoza
A document written in 1628 at Luis de Céspedes Jería's request is transcribed in this paper, in which he gives the King of Spain an account of his trip from Brazil to Guairá -territory for which he had just been appointed its Governor-, following the fluvial route most heavily traveled by the bandeirantes from Sao Paulo (then the great centre and depot of Indian slave trade), adventurers of all nations who joined the Portuguese slave-hunting expeditions into the Guarani ‘reducciones'(Indian settlements which were the social and economic extensions of the Jesuit Missions) under Jesuit control. Such historical circumstance and some other factors of the Lusohispanic contact in the Rio de la Plata and Brazilian border area would account for the penetration of Portuguese loan words in the Spanish language of that South American region.The manuscript document is analyzed as to its various linguistic and extra-linguistic levels emphasizing the importance of those traits that due to the burden of tradition or evolutionary development would contribute to characterize American Spanish. In addition, the analysis of this four-page text illustrates traits of the creolization process that the colonists' regional varieties were undergoing in the New World Spanish at the time as well as the lack of proficiency of a newlyarrived-in-America Spaniard, as was Céspedes Jería's case, in the usage of lexical items from Indigenous languages of the Americas to designate native plants or objects (e.g., trigo de Indias instead of the Indoamericanism maíz or embarcación de palo instead of canoa).
Keywords:
River Plate Spanish, Guarani missions, language contact, creolization
Frago Gracia, J. A. (2004). El español por la ruta de los bandeirantes. Boletín De Filología, 40, Pág. 11–37. Retrieved from https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/17997
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