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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 23:1 (2023) ► pp.34–59

Pioneers of contrastive linguistics

Dominican missionaries in Highland Guatemala

ORCID logo | Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
This paper revisits the translational practices of Dominican missionaries who worked in multilingual settings in the Guatemalan highlands in the colonial period. It is argued that the missionaries developed the emerging ideas of European Renaissance linguistics and applied methods of contrastive linguistics to indigenous languages long before this discipline came into being. The main argument derives from an 18th-century collection of missionary writings in Q’eqchi’ and Poqomchi’, two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. An uncommon phrase-by-phrase alignment of bilingual texts allows for the assumption that a contrastive approach to genetically related languages could be the underlying principle in language learning and translation at that time.
Keywords: history of linguistics, missionary linguistics, contrastive approach, translation studies, Mayan languages, Q’eqchi’/Poqomchi’
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Dominican mission and the linguistic environment in colonial Guatemala
  • 3.Manuscript #68 in the Berendt-Brinton Linguistic Collection
  • 4.Bilingual missionary sources as a first step to contrastive analysis
  • 5.An attempt at a contrastive study of selected grammatical domains
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 6 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.21013.vin
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Cited by one other publication

Matsumoto, Mallory E.
2023. Water, Identity, and Baptism in K’iche’an Maya Narratives from Colonial Highland Guatemala. History of Religions 63:2 ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo

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