Las primeras gramáticas mesoamericanas: Algunos rasgos lingüísticos
Summary
On the basis of an analysis of ten grammars of different Meso-American indigenous languages crafted by missionaries during the 16th century, the author attempts to dress an inventory of the specific linguistic traits that characterizes them. These characteristics highlight the efforts which the authors had to make in order to penetrate these unknown and typologically distant languages from those studied at the time of the Renaissance. The present article points out that the missionaries, who had no formal linguistic training, made use of principles of classic hermeneutics, of analogy and anomaly, in order to analyze the function of the word in these new languages. It also establishes the value of these missionary grammars for the philology of the Meso-American indigenous languages, which is only at a beginning.