On the metalanguage of the first Grammar of Aymara (1603)

This paper investigates the linguistic categories adopted by the Jesuit missionary Ludovico Bertonio in his early modern European description of the Andean language of Aymara. Like other missionary grammars in the Spanish colonial world, Bertonio’s linguistic work tends to impose traditional terms and classifications, familiar to Latin and Romance languages, to an indigenous language that is completely different in its typological structure from the IndoEuropean model and exhibits morphological and syntactic strategies that were entirely new at that time. Thus, in his description of noun declension, the missionary grammarian reduces the rich Aymara case system to only six case endings (casos) according to Latin morphology, assigning the leftover cases to the category of preposition (preposicion). On the other hand, he is able to recognize the exact meaning and role of derivational suffixes (particulas) that are part of the extremely rich verbal system of Aymara, without however realizing their full syntactic value in terms of subordination strategies. The subordination system of Aymara is indeed richer in morphologically bound forms, some of which are involved in a process of nominalization (verbo substantivo) to create different clause types (causal, relative, infinitive, temporal, conditional, purpose, etc.). In fact, Bertonio considers such nominalization process as a morphological strategy that does not belong to syntax (construcion).