Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (74 page)

Several of them were presented at court, and received baptism, with royal godparents, no less. Most of them either died in Spain or took flight as soon as they returned to the Indies, and only one of them, now (after baptism) known as Diego Colón, did service as an interpreter. Columbus had at first been under the impression that all the ‘Indians’ he met spoke the same language; but the limited usefulness of Diego as he toured even the rest of the Caribbean islands gave him, first of the Europeans, an inkling of how diverse the language stock of these lands really was.

This kind of attempt to capture likely lads and train them up as interpreters was never a great success, although persisted with for thirty years or so. It caused resentment when candidates were taken by force—the native populations of Taino Indians already had bitter experience in their own culture of raids by neighbours for enslavement and human sacrifice—and far too often the apprentices died in the unnatural setting of life in Europe.

More effective was the natural process whereby an isolated Spaniard, shipwrecked or on the run from his own people, would take up life in an Indian village, and so get to know their language, before returning to act as interpreter. There are a good dozen such cases on record.
⁵
One of these turned out to be crucial for the first Spanish advance into the interior of America, when in 1519 Cortés penetrated to the heart of the Mexican empire. He communicated through a relay of two interpreters, one of them Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had spent eight years in a Mayan village after a shipwreck on the coast of Yucatán, the other the famous Malin-tzin, a Nahuatl-speaking woman from Coatzacoalcos who had been traded to a nearby Mayan community, Xicalango, in childhood.

As interpreters of Spanish, many native trainees remained rather inadequate, lacking the background to understand the Spaniards’ real interests, even if they were as self-motivated as the Peruvian Felipillo, who had ‘learnt the [Spanish] language without anyone teaching him … [and] was the first interpreter that Peru had’.
⁶

He was the main interpreter during the conquest of Peru, and mediated the first, crucial, conversation with Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, just before the decisive battle of Cajamarca. Felipillo was called on to translate a harsh and pithy address by the Dominican friar, Fray Vicente Valverde, which ran through the basic doctrines of Christianity, the apparent duty of the Pope and the Spanish emperor Charles to convert the world, and the consequent need for Atahuallpa to submit to them without further ado.

Atahuallpa’s reply is transmitted by Inca Garcilaso, himself a
mestizo
bilingual in Spanish and the Inca language Quechua, but also a highly educated student of Ciceronian rhetoric, writing more than a lifetime after the event. By his account, the poverty of the translation seems to have vitiated any chance that understanding, or at least courtesy, could be maintained. Atahuallpa is supposed to have replied at length, starting with a comment on the poor quality of the interpreting:

A speech of this level of elaboration was evidently going to floor such a simple interpreter as Felipillo, but it is most likely a fiction of Garcilaso’s, in accord with the best traditions of classical history-writing. Nevertheless, Garcilaso does claim that the Spaniards ‘who were unable to brook the length of the discourse, had left their places and fallen on the Indians’. So intolerance of long-windedness in an unknown language perhaps played a role in the action that did develop.

After the conquests were achieved and Spaniards installed in positions of power, there was little in the new economic order that was established, with native inhabitants of a region assigned to work on the land or in mines, that would have encouraged widespread diffusion of the Spanish language. Repetitive duties among static populations would minimise the need for communication between master and subject. There was nothing analogous to military service in the Roman empire, or the spread of monasteries and universities in medieval Europe, which would diffuse the language of the Spanish masters around their domains. There was, in any case, a constant flow of Spanish speakers emigrating from Spain itself to boost the speaker population. Yet a substantial number of bilinguals would have been needed to organise the work of the natives. They would have arisen naturally as the Spanish immigrants, overwhelmingly male, took Indian wives or mistresses (
mancebas
) and began to raise families with them. Their children, known as
mestizos
, would learn both languages from their parents. ‘As early as 1503, the Court recommends to the governor of Hispaniola that some Christians should marry some Indian women, so that they may communicate with and teach one another.’
⁸

Such enthusiasm for the
Nueva Raza
, the ‘new race’ generated by these interracial unions, is one feature that strongly distinguishes Spanish imperialism from the attitudes of later Anglo-Saxon empire-builders. Among the famous
conquistadores
, almost every one had
mestizo
children, often with several different women, and they were fully recognised as heirs to their fathers. Cortés, Pizarro, Benalcázar and Alvarado all conform to this tradition; indeed, Pope Clement VII officially legitimised three sons of Cortés in a bull of 1529, although he did temporise a little: ‘the virtues’ beauty purges in the sons the stain of the birth, and with the purity of customs the shame of origin is effaced’.

So common was interracial matrimony (soon complicated by the import of black slaves from Africa) that a taxonomy of the terms for mixed-race children was devised, and famously illustrated.
⁹
Modern Hispanic commentators tend to idealise this state of affairs, referring, for example, to the mixed racial background of the Spanish in Europe, but the facts that the attempt was made to keep everyone classified, and that the power and status of the nominally pure Spanish families (
criollos
) remained high until the end of the empire—exceeded indeed only by that of immigrants from Spain—suggest that the society was not so free of race-based oppression as is sometimes claimed. However, whatever the level of acceptance and encouragement of the various types of union that were solemnised (or not), there is very little documentary evidence of language usage in these families.

What evidence there is comes from the unchallengeable fact of literary distinction in many early
mestizos.
They were not only interpreters, but also literary translators and authors, in Spanish and in Latin too.
^*
Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, from the line of the kings of Tezcoco, Cortés’ allies, was known as the ‘Livy of Anáhuac’, author of the
Historia Chichimeca.
And his son Bartolomé adapted into Nahuatl two contemporary Spanish plays by Lope de Vega, and another by Calderón. They were not alone; chronicles of the conquest of all parts of the empires of the New World were soon being written up, in Spanish, by the very people produced by that conquest.
¹⁰

The most distinguished of the literary mestizos was probably the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), born in Cuzco, the Inca capital, seven years after the conquest, his father being the Spanish nobleman Captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas, and his mother Palla Chimpu Ocllo, second cousin of the two last Incas, Huayna Capac and Atahuallpa. He emigrated to Spain in his early twenties, and lived there until his death, so his career says little directly about the relative strength of languages in Peru. But he was a man familiar with the sense of different languages: having learnt Quechua and Spanish as a child, and Latin in his youth, he had then learnt sufficient Italian to translate a book entitled
Dialogues of Love.
He went on to write two lengthy historical works of his own,
The Florida of the Inca
, about de Soto’s campaign through Florida, and a two-part history called
Royal Commentaries of the Incas
and
General History of Peru.
In this last work, he has a lot to say about the relative roles of the Quechua and Spanish languages, often quoting the views of another famous literary
mestizo
, Father Blas Valera (who had written a history of Peru in Latin).

It was Garcilaso and Blas Valera’s view that the advent of Spanish power to Peru, with the civil wars and social disruption that it brought in its train, had disrupted the convenient linguistic unity that the Incas had succeeded in imposing over their empire, and which should have been exploited in the propagation of the Christian faith.

It has been claimed
¹²
that Garcilaso’s underlying point was that the Incas understood better than their conquerors the fundamental point of Nebrija, whose ground-breaking grammar of Spanish—as we have seen—had begun with the thesis ‘that always language was the companion of empire’. Garcilaso certainly held the view, still widely held today though not among knowledgeable linguists, that a shared language makes for common understanding and good mutual relations: ‘because the likeness and conformity of words almost always tend to reconcile people and bring them to true union and friendship’.
¹³

Whatever the truth on this point of ideology, the existence of Antonio Nebrija’s works, grammars both of Latin (
Introductiones Latinae
) and contemporary Spanish (
Gramatica de la lengua castellana
), demonstrated that it was possible to capture the ‘art’ of a language explicitly on the page. And the missionaries soon flocking to the New World made use of this demonstration to found the world’s first tradition of descriptive linguistics.

Entering Mexico, this new virgin territory for the Church, where bilinguals hardly existed at any level of society, the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars immediately realised that they would have to work through the people’s own languages if they were to make serious progress in spreading the faith.
^*
This meant the languages would have to be learnt. The population to be contacted was vast: many million to set against the 802 friars present in Mexico in 1557.
¹⁴
Clearly, this was work for many generations. And since there would necessarily be a circulation of missionaries, with old ones retiring and fresh recruits coming out from Spain—i.e. the tradition had to be carried on without the natural transmission of languages through raising children—the languages would have to be taught afresh, over and over, to each new generation of adult learners. For the first time in the world’s history, there was a clear demand for language-learning textbooks, specifically grammars (’
Artes
’) and dictionaries, as well as native-language versions of the prayer books and confessionals that were the tools of the Catholic missionary’s trade.
^†

And conveniently enough, there were now the technical means to satisfy the demand: printing presses were installed in Mexico City in 1535; their first known product, the
Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana
, which came out in 1539, was for ecclesiastical use, and despite its title was written in Nahuatl. In 1546 it was followed by Fray Alonso de Molina’s
Doctrina Christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana
, and in 1547 by
Arte de la lengua mexicana
by Father Andres de Olmos, and an accompanying volume,
Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana.
^§
Volumes in others of the country’s languages followed, beginning with expositions of Christian doctrines in Huastec in 1548 and Mixtec in 1550. Peru could not wait for the press, and the first
Arte
of the Quechua language,
Grammatica, o arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los Reynos del Peru
, was actually printed in Spain, in Valladolid, in 1560. But when printing started in Lima (Peru) in 1583, among its first products were
Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Quichua, Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Aymara
(both 1583), and
Doctrina Christiana… traduzido en las dos lenguas generales de este Reyno, Quichua y Aymara
(1584).
¹⁵

This was just scratching the surface of the unknown continent’s languages. The ultimate harvest of linguistic knowledge that was gained in the Americas, primarily to serve missionary activity, was vast. In 1892 the Count of Viõaza listed 493 distinct languages identified by Spanish linguists in the Americas over three and a half centuries of research, and the titles of significant documents describing some aspect of 369 of them. In that period 667 separate authors had produced 1,188 works.
¹⁶