Anna Santana |
Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- Is it possible to do a linguistic immersion in Guanche? This is the proposal made by the writer Agustín Gajate based on a piece of information: although there is no Rosetta stone of the aboriginal language, thousands of words from the ancient Canaries still survive, which are not only place names and anthroponyms.
Agustín Gajate is a journalist and writer from Tenerife who will raise this challenge tomorrow at a conference on the Guanche language at the Island Library of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in an act that is part of the “Encounters with the author” project.
“The Guanche language from Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa to the present day” is the title of the conference that will be given by Gajate, who explains in an interview with EFE that he will propose to the attendees to travel back in time and carry out a linguistic immersion with the forms of expression used by the Guanches “that have transcended to this day compiled by different authors and at different times in each and every one of the islands.”
The central figure of the dissertation is Cairasco de Figueroa as the first nationally renowned Canarian writer in the Golden Age of Spanish Literature, and who in 1582 premiered the “Comedia del recibimiento”, in which two of his characters, Doramas and Sabiduría , they have a short conversation in the Guanche language, a language that the author spoke and knew through his mother.
Since then, no references or works have been found in which Canarian authors have used the Guanche language as a form of expression beyond the collection of oral testimonies or the dissemination of studies on place names and anthroponyms, adds Agustín Gajate.
It was precisely this Tinerfeno journalist and writer who retook words in this language in his 2013 bilingual poembook “Achicaxna xaxo agual, word of pariah mummy”, and three years later in the novel “The Foundations of Gomorrah”, whose dialogues are written in guanche and translated footnotes.
This was possible after Gajate began to investigate the survival of the language of the ancient Canaries and found that there are thousands of words registered, not only names of places and people, but even the numbering from 1 to 999.
Authors such as Antonio Viana also collected words from the ancient Canaries and Leonardo Torriani even collected two lamentations, one from Gran Canaria and the other from El Hierro, and recently the philologist Maximiano Trapero published a three-volume dictionary of place names.
“It’s a tool to use,” says Agustín Gajate, also author of the “antipoemario” ‘Nothing, nobody, none’, who points out that the Guanche language has been basically oral and therefore there is no Rosetta stone on the islands that the key to its translation, there was no plan to engrave its history in stone but, if anything, to inscribe signs and indications, as occurs in the engravings of El Julan (El Hierro).
For this reason, Gajate disagrees with the proliferation of editions that compare the language that the Amazigh peoples currently use in North Africa as if it were the same as that spoken by the Guanches before and after the Castilian conquest.
“Despite the fact that both languages probably have a common origin, the time elapsed, with at least fifteen centuries of separation, and the historical ups and downs in Mediterranean North Africa mean that the resemblance between the two languages is, at best, similar to that of Italian and Portuguese, both coming from Latin, but clearly differentiated languages today”, he explains.
In fact, a significant number of the words that Dominik Wölfel compiled in his “Monumenta linguae Canariae” do not have a parallel meaning in North Africa, which seems logical given the evolution of languages even within the islands themselves, with dialects different.
However, during the conquest of Gran Canaria, Juan Rejón had indigenous people from La Gomero brought in to try to act as interpreters for the Canaries, adds Agustín Gajate, who also points out that there are constructions of words that, with the same meaning, were articulated differently in each island.
The presence of Spanish also implied the modification of many of these structures, but traits such as the elimination of prepositions (goat meat instead of goat meat) continue to influence the configuration of Canarian speech, since in the old aboriginal language the construction with words and concepts on the use of prepositions and articles. EFE