Part of
Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and BeyondEdited by Karen Dakin, Claudia Parodi and Natalie Operstein
[Studies in Language Companion Series 185] 2017
► pp. 210–227
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.