La lengua de los tobas bolivianos en un vocabulario inédito del franciscano Hermán Cattunar (c. 1911)

Abstract

Much of what we know about the society of Toba peoples in the Bolivian Chaco comes from publications of Franciscan missionaries who interacted with them in the 19th century. European explorers and ethnographers published short ethnographic descriptions and wrote down some words in Toba language, but those are insufficient for analyzing their language. Lack of linguistic data prevents us from corroborating our presumption about cultural and social ties that historically would have linked the Bolivian Tobas with the so-called western Tobas of Argentina. In this work, we systematize linguistic data in an unpublished Toba vocabulary attributed to the Franciscan Hermán Cattunar (c. 1911), considering the context in which it was produced. We present the structure of the vocabulary and describe, from a functionalist perspective, the free pronouns, the verbal pronominal indexes (Haspelmath 2013; Cysouw 2003), the negation strategies (Miestamo 2000, 2006), and the cardinal numbers as recorded by Cattunar. Our analysis contributes to understand possible grammaticalization processes in Guaycuruan languages, undetectable when each language is analyzed synchronically. It also provides materials to investigate the hypothesis of contact between the Bolivian Tobas and other Tobas in the region.

Keywords

• Missionary linguistics
• bolivian Tobas
• pronominal systems
• negation
• cardinal numbers.