Classical Guarani

Classical Guarani
Missionary Guarani, Old Guarani
Native to	Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil
Region	Jesuit missions among the Guaraní
Ethnicity	Guaraní, Jesuit missionaries
Era	16th century – 18th century AD
Language family	Tupian Tupi–Guarani Guarani (I) Guaraní Classical Guarani
Writing system	Guarani alphabet (Latin script)
Official status
Official language in	Governorate of Paraguay
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	oldp1258
Map of the Jesuit reductions among the Guarani

Classical Guarani, also known as Missionary Guarani or Old Guarani, is an extinct variant of the Guarani language. It was spoken in the region of the thirty Jesuit missions among the Guarani (current territories of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil). The Franciscans made the first grammatical descriptions of the language, and the Jesuits further developed that work after the establishment of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay.¹ According to Carolina Rodríguez-Alcalá, the spoken language was both the source and the target of the missionary linguistic work: oral use was observed to document the language, while the resulting texts were intended to be transmitted orally to Indigenous people rather than read directly by them.¹ Classical Guarani went extinct gradually after the suppression of the Society in 1767.

Despite its extinction, its bibliographical production and that of written documents was rich and is still mostly conserved.² Therefore, it is considered an important literary branch in the history of Guarani.

Following the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the Guarani varieties spoken in the Jesuit missions came into increasing contact with other varieties spoken throughout the region. Modern scholars have shown that Guarani has always been the main language of the Jesuit Guarani missions and, later on, to the whole Governorate of Paraguay which belonged to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits, the residents of the reductions emigrated gradually towards territories of current Paraguay, Corrientes, Uruguay, Entre Ríos and those to the North of Río Salado. These migratory moves caused a one-sided change in the language, making it stray far from the original dialect that the Jesuits had studied.³⁴

Classical Guarani kept away from Hispanicisms, favoring the use of the language's agglutinative nature to coin new terms. This process would often lead to the Jesuits using more complex and synthetic terms to transmit Western concepts. Modern Guarani varieties, on the other hand, have been characterized by a free influx, unregulated with regards to Hispanicisms which were often incorporated with a minimal phonological adaptation. Thus, the word for communion in Classical Guarani would be Tȗpȃ́rára whereas in Modern Paraguayan Guarani it is komuño (from Spanish comunión).⁵

This section describes the phonology of Old Guarani based on a reconstruction proposed by linguist Danielle Marcelle Grannier grounded in an analysis of documentation by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya.⁶

Classical Guarani using letters from the Latin alphabet assigned to each phoneme by Jesuit missionaries.

Some of the orthographical rules are as follows:⁷

• c is read as /k/ before a, o and u. It is read as /s/ before e and i. ç is used only before the vowels where c would otherwise be read as /k/ (ço /so/ to avoid co /ko/).
• qu is read as /k/ before e and i and as /kʷ/ before a, in which case it always forms a diphthong or triphthong (e.g. que /ke/, tequay /teˈkʷaj/).
• Syllables with ĭ and ỹ are always stressed.
• Syllables ending in ĭ and ỹ are always oxytones.
• Syllables with circumflex accents are always stressed.
• Two vowels next to each other are separated by a glottal stop unless a circumflex accent is added to form a diphthong in which case the syllable is always stressed unless specified otherwise (e.g. cue is read as /kuˈʔe/ while cuê is read as /kʷe/)

According to linguist Hedy Penner, until the 1960s many grammarians associated the glottal stop with suprasegmental phenomena, such as hiatus, stress or syllable boundary, and represented it in writing with a symbol such as a hyphen or an apostrophe.⁸

Classical Guarani only had four numbers on its own. Bigger numbers were introduced later on in the rest of Guarani languages.

Sometimes they used yrundĭ hae nirȗî or ace pópeteȋ́ 'one human hand' for five, ace pómȏcȏî 'two human hands' for ten and mbó mbĭ abé 'hands and also feet' or ace pó ace pĭ abé 'human hands and also human feet' for twenty.⁹

Many nouns and verbs in its most basic form ("root") ended in consonants. However, the language did not allow lexemes to end in consonants. Therefore this form was never used alone by itself in speech but existed only hypothetically. It was, however, used accompanied by suffixes. For dictionaries and other books with the purpose of studying the language, this form was written with the last consonant between two full stops (e.g. tú.b. is the root, túba is the nominative).

The language had no gender and no number as well. If an emphasis was to be made, they used words such as hetá (many) or specified the cardinal number.

Act of Contrition from Catecismo de la lengua guaraní, the first catechism in Guarani, by Friar Antonio Ruiz de Montoya.

Hae oȃngaipapaguê mboaçĭpa nateí. Cheyara Ieſu Chriſto Tȗpȃ́ eté Aba eté abé eicóbo, amboaçĭ chepĭ á guibé, ndebe cheangaipá haguêra nde Tȗpȃ́ etérȃmȏ nderecó rehé, che nde raĭhú rehé mbaepȃbȇ́ açoçé abé. Tapoí coĭterȏ́ che angaipábaguî, tañêmombeû Paí vpé, nde ñỹrȏ́ angá chébe, nde remȋ́mborará rehé, ndereȏ́ rehé abé. Amen Ieſus.