Abstract:

The contribution offered here aims to provide a first contrastive study of three linguistic works written by the Spanish missionaries in the Province of New Andalusia (today, North-Eastern Venezuela territory) in the 17th century in order to highlight their differences and coincidences, with illustrative examples. The missionary linguistic sources to be compared are: Arte y vocabulario de la lengua de los indios Chaimas, cumanagotos, cores, parias y otros diversos de la Provincia de Cumaná o Nueva Andalucía byFrancisco de Tauste (1680), Principios y reglas de la lengua cumanagota byManuel Yangües (1683) and Reglas para la inteligencia de la lengua de los indios byMatías Ruiz Blanco (1690). This paper attempts to explore the recognition of dialectal varieties, the grammatical standardization efforts and the categorization criteria followed by the Spanish missionaries in the codification of the Cariban2languages.

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