Manuel de Yangües, Principios y reglas de la lengua cummanagota (Burgos, 1683)
The printed grammar of Cumanagoto, a Cariban language of the Venezuelan coast, issued at Burgos in 1683 with a dictionary by Matías Ruiz Blanco bound in behind it. It describes a language with no case endings through the categories of Nebrija's Latin Arte, admits at the outset that the pronouns are the hardest part of the book, and exists so that a missionary could preach. A century later the language it fixed was the general tongue of thirty-four mission towns.
Why this wins its question: The Cariban languages of the Venezuelan coast are a blank in English-language accounts of missionary linguistics, which run from Nahuatl to Quechua to Guaraní; Cumanagoto appears, when it appears, as a name in a list of extinct languages. This object quotes the 1683 book: the full title page and the fact that the dictionary bound behind the grammar is another man's work, the sentence in which the author adopts Nebrija's divisions, the postposed particles that do the work Latin gives to endings, the confession that the pronouns are the most obscure and difficult thing in the arte, the unexplained first-person-plural doublet. It states in a claim of its own that the volume read is a reset nineteenth-century reproduction and takes the lower tier for it, and it closes with the two sentences from a 1779 missionary that give both the achievement - a general language across thirty-four towns - and its mechanism, people brought down from the hills who lose their own dialect within a short time of being settled.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page reads "PRINCIPIOS, Y REGLAS DE LA LENGUA CUMMANAGOTA, GENERAL EN VARIAS NACIONES, QUE HABITAN EN LA PROVINCIA DE CUMMANA EN LAS INDIAS OCCIDENTALES. Compuestos por el R. P. Predicador Fr. Manuel de Yangues, del Orden de N. P. S. Francisco, hijo de la S. Provincia de Castilla, y Missionero en las vivas Conversiones de los Cummanagotos, Piritus, y otras Naciones... CON LICENCIA. EN BURGOS: Por Iuan de Viar. Año de 1683."
The same title page states that the book is a revision and that it carries a second work inside it: the Principios are "SACADOS A LUZ AORA NUEVAMENTE, corregidos, y reducidos à mayor claridad, y brevedad, junto con un Diccionario que ha compuesto el R. P. Fr. Mathias Blanco" - Matías Ruiz Blanco, of the same order, missionary in the same conversions and synodal examiner of the bishopric of San Juan de Puerto Rico.
The volume opened for this object is not the 1683 printing but Julio Platzmann's "Algunas obras raras sobre la lengua cumanagota, publicadas de nuevo", volume II, Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1888, whose own half-title calls it an "EDICION FACSIMILAR". The description is only partly exact: the 1683 title page and the woodblock ornaments are reproduced photographically, but the text is reset in modern type that keeps the original spelling, the folio numbers, the signature letters and the catchwords. That is why the tier of this object is secondary and not primary.
The book is built in tratados on the parts of speech, the first on the noun and the second on the pronoun, ending at folio 70 with "FIN"; there follow "ADVERTENCIAS PARA LA recta inteligencia de el Diccionario" at folio 71 and, from folio 73 to the end of the volume, the "DICCIONARIO DE la Lengua de los Indios Cummanagotos, y Palenques, compuesto por el Padre Fray Matias Ruiz Blanco, de la Orden de nuestro Padre San Francisco", alphabetical from "A preposicion, Ca, l, pona, l, quaca".
The descriptive frame is openly borrowed: "Iremos, pues, tratando de los pronombres, segun las diuisiones, que contiene el Arte de Antonio" (f. 5), that is Nebrija's. The frame is applied to a language that does not work like Latin, and the first tratado says so: where Latin distinguishes cases by their terminations, "En esta lengua se discierne[n] los casos de el nombre por ciertas particulas, que se le posponen" - house is "Pata", the house fell down "Patameenan", my father's house "Vmpatàr", tiger's foot "EKereyptar", deer's tooth "Cozeder", and the dative is formed by the postposed particle "uya" (f. 1).
The author states the limit of his own method before the reader reaches it. Opening the tratado on pronouns: "LA mucha variacion cõ que en este Idioma se hablan los pronombres (especialmente en los acusatiuos) haze, que su explicacion sea la mas obscura, y dificil de todas las de este arte; y asi es forçoso aya en ella mucho estudio, y particularissimo cuydado para practicarla con acierto, y prontitud" (f. 4).
The pronoun list of folio 5 gives "Vre, Yo. Amuère, Tu. MueK, Aquel. Amna, Nosotros. Amiamorcomo" and "Amiarcom, Vosotros. MuKiamo, Aquellos", with reflexive and emphatic series beside them. In the oblique forms of the first person plural the page prints alternatives without a rule for choosing between them - "Amnauya, vl, Kuyacom, de nosotros. Amnapoy, vl, Kepoycom. Por nosotros" - and the arte does not say when each is used. No modern analysis of that alternation is asserted here; what is recorded is that the doublet is on the page and unexplained.
What the book was for is stated in its own prologue, and it is not description for its own sake: "TE ofrezco, piadoso Lector, en este Libro vna buena voluntad de aliviarte en la suma dificultad, que has de experimentar, à el noticiarte de este nueuo idioma; que siendo vnico medio para cumplir tu vocacion, no dudo, que el verle puesto en Arte serà incentiuo, para q perseueres en ella", the vocation being "el ministerio de convertir Infieles à la verdadera, y Catolica Religion" ("Al lector").
A century later the language the book fixed was the working tongue of a mission province. Antonio Caulín, writing of the Píritu missions in 1779, reports thirty-four towns of nearly twelve thousand people who "por la mayor parte se comunican en lengua Cumanagóta, que por ser la mas antigua Nacion en su reduccion, y mas dilatada, atraxo à su general idioma à las demás Naciones, que sucesivamente se fueron agregando" - except the Carib nation, more numerous, which kept its own language in the thirteen towns founded of it (f. 88).
The same page names the mechanism of that spread, and it is not persuasion. Caulín observes that it is ordinarily experienced with Indians "que traidos de los montes, y puestos en el Pueblo de distinto lenguage, à poco tiempo dexan su natural dialecto, y se acomodan al de la Nacion, ò Pueblo, à que se avecindan" (f. 88). A general language in the missions was in part the product of congregation, and the missionary who records the language shift records it with approval.