Abstract
This paper proposes a corpus-linguistic approach to Jesuit missionary Luys de Valdivia’s 1606 Sermón en Lengua de Chile [Sermon in the Language of Chile]. It enquires into the importance, potential and limitations this text presents in shaping our understanding of sixteenth-century Mapudungun. It also surveys the historical and linguistic context of the Sermones and their author, highlighting the overlap between the processes of language documentation and evangelisation. Throughout, we spotlight a new resource for mining early textual witnesses for the Mapuche tongue: the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun. We examine a number of structural features of the corpus and its construction, going on to exemplify their use in a series of lexical, morphological and phonological case studies related to Valdivia’s work. We conclude by calling on the academic and non- academic communities to use the freely-available corpus materials and tools in order to promote a better understanding of the language, whilst at the same time enjoying and propagating it.
Translated title of the contribution | The Sermon in the Language of Chile in the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun: From Colonial text to digital text |
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Original language | Spanish |
Article number | 2 |
Pages (from-to) | 21-50 |
Number of pages | 30 |
Journal | Lenguas y Literaturas Indoamericanas |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 2 |
Publication status | Published - 13 Jul 2022 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- corpus linguistics
- Mapudungun
- historical linguistics
- missionary linguistics