Chapter 10
Spanish–Huastec (Mayan) 16th-century language contact attested in the Doctrina Christiana en la lengua guasteca by Friar Juan de la Cruz, 1571
The aim of this paper is to present some aspects of Huastec–Spanish contact reflected in the early Colonial document entitled Doctrina Christiana en la lengua guasteca (De la Cruz 1571). First, I will present the morphological and syntactic strategies used to introduce Catholic words such as those for “baptism”, “devil”, “hell”, etc. from Spanish into Huastec. Second, I will show that the Spanish lexical borrowings were not registered by De la Cruz as phonologically assimilated into Huastec but rather simply included in the text with their forms in Spanish orthography.
Article outline
- 1.The language and its history
- 2.About the document studied as linguistic corpus
- 3.Theoretical principles
- 4.The data evidence of grammatical interference: Morphological and syntactic strategies used to introduce or to translate Catholic loanwords and clauses from Spanish into 16th century Huastec
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4.1Neologisms
- 4.2Syntactic calques
- 5.Grammatical integration of loanwords without phonological assimilation
- 6.Conclusion
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References