Worlds in Negotiation: A Study of the Metalanguage in the
Tupinamba/ Nheengatu Tradition
Cristina Altman
University of São Paulo
[email protected]
This ongoing study on the Tupinamba/ Nheengatu descriptive tradition (16th–19th centuries) is
part of a larger study on linguistic historiography in Latin American context, whose theme
focuses on the tension between the perception of the linguistic diversity and its standardized
modes of representation. In fact, thinking in a homogeneous way about a very heterogeneous
situation seems to have been our colonial inheritance. It can be seen in the 16th century
missionaries’ decision to use ‘the most widely spoken language’ along the Brazilian coast as
their instrument of catechization; or in the decision of the Portuguese crown, in the 18th
century, to declare the Portuguese language the only and the official language in both the
states of Maranhão and Grão Pará and in the state of Brazil; and in the recommendation of the
scientific missions of the 2nd Empire, in the 19th century, on the need to adopt the
Tupi-Guarani based língua geral throughout the hinterland of Brazil, as a strategy which
would integrate both peoples and territories.
Under the cover name of Documenta Project (ALTMAN & COELHO 2006), we have been
collecting and organizing materials that describe the languages spoken in colonial Brazil, with
particular interest in the metalinguistic terms used by their authors. In the present paper I
concentrate on two small corpora of the Tupinamba/ Nheengatu tradition that contrast in
terms of the period in which they were written and the type of education received by their
authors. I will be considering, on the one hand: ANCHIETA 1990[1595], FIGUEIRA 1621,
Vocabulário da Língua Brasílica (VLB) (=Ayrosa 1938 [1622]), ANONYMOUS 18th cent.
(=Coimbra Codex 69), ANONYMOUS 1795 (= AYROSA 1934 [1795]); and on the other: FARIA
1858, GONÇALVES Dias 1858, HARTT 1937[1872], COUTO DE MAGALHÃES 1876, SYMPSON
1877 and BARBOSA RODRIGUES 1890.
Although the majority of the documents assembled attest the viewpoint of the European colonizer,
as expected, my working hypothesis in the present study is that there must be certain remnants of
the colonized Other within the texts. As a matter of fact, together with the terms unequivocally
employed as a technical metalanguage, we came upon various terms that represented the
descriptive tradition adopted by the author(s), while excluding others; or terms employed to
describe their view of the language in question (or the intellectual climate of this time); terms
describing their opinion of other languages, and∕or terms that added complementary information
about them; in addition, terms that corresponded to the denomination of the language(s)
described; terms used for the characters and the places of the time; terms referring to the
procedures regarding the descriptive tradition adopted; and terms related to (explicit, implicit)
theories regarding didactics, translation, sociolinguistic features; and to historical or
anthropological events (Cf. also ZWARTJES, COORD., & FLORES & ALTMAN 2006).
All these terms, peripheral from a strict grammatical viewpoint, give us some clues as to the
dialogue between the participants in the colonial missionary enterprise, as well as between the
participants of a later project of construction of a national identity. In other words, the act of
describing an indigenous language in a European-Latin mold can be revised as a longstanding
process of linguistic and cultural negotiation between different worlds, whose voices,
although asymmetric, can be perceived and reconstructed, at least partially, by the
historiographer.
References
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