Papers by Gregory Haimovich
LINGUA, 2023
Nahuatl has a long history of contact with, and marginalization by, Spanish. Today the language s... more Nahuatl has a long history of contact with, and marginalization by, Spanish. Today the language shift maintains a steady pace, despite numerous initiatives for revitalization and revalorization. This paper deals with the lexical creativity of Nahuatl speakers. As a result of the fieldwork of our research team in six communities in Mexico, we have amassed rich data concerning neologisms that designate objects and concepts imported from European culture. Unlike most studies on language contact in Nahuatl, we choose to focus not on the morphosyntactic strategies of lexicogenesis, or on phenomena of matter and/or pattern borrowing, but on the conceptual structure of neologisms, applying the onomasiological theory of word-formation. We argue that, while language endangerment and the lack of an obvious need for lexicogenesis may cause some productivity patterns to go dormant, these do not necessarily become eradicated. Moreover, innovative patterns of word-formation may come to light when lexical creativity is triggered.
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Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
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Journal of Language Contact
The article deals with the analysis of phenomena of language contact between Spanish and Quechua,... more The article deals with the analysis of phenomena of language contact between Spanish and Quechua, found in the Doctrina Christiana y Catecismo para instruccion de los Indios (1584). These phenomena include primarily loanwords, loan blends, shifts of meaning and morphosyntactic calques, encountered throughout the Quechua version of the Doctrina Christiana y Catecismo, a profound ecclesiastical work, which influenced greatly the process of evangelization of the Andes. In addition, the article concerns other issues, like the early adaptation of Quechua to writing and phonological conundrum associated with this process, origins of the verb iñiy and the use of Quechua evidential markers in dcc . The analysis is intended to understand better the influence of evangelization on Quechua language, both in terms of diachronic linguistics and corpus planning.
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Estudios Latinoamericanos, 2017
El Ritual formulario e institución de curas (1631) del fray Juan Pérez Bocanegra, además de ser u... more El Ritual formulario e institución de curas (1631) del fray Juan Pérez Bocanegra, además de ser una obra inmensa de carácter eclesiástico, tiene gran importancia lingüística y etnohistórica: está compuesto simultáneamente en español y quechua y su contenido abarca muchos aspectos de la vida cultural andina en la época colonial temprana. Este estudio investiga tal lado del contenido del Ritual formulario como las relaciones entre géneros, el sujeto al cual el clero católico prestaba mucha atención en su campaña de evangelización de la población indígena del Perú. Se analiza la terminología quechua usada por Pérez Bocanegra cuando él refiere a las prácticas sexuales, amorosas y matrimoniales de los indígenas, y sus testimonios se comparan con los proveídos por cronistas del periodo contemporáneo.
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This article analyzes the Spanish-Quechua bilingualism of El Primer Nueva coronica e Buen gobiern... more This article analyzes the Spanish-Quechua bilingualism of El Primer Nueva coronica e Buen gobierno, in attempt to discern the logic behind such frequent use of Quechua words and phrases by Guaman Poma in his work. Taking into consideration previous researches on textual bilingualism, the Quechua corpus of the Nueva coronica has been examined by a number of parameters, that would demonstrate, whether Guaman Poma resorted to Quechua spontaneously or deliberately, and whether he tried to make his chronicle as much comprehensible for a Spanish-speaking reader as possible or not. The results of this examination can help us to better understand, whom Guaman Poma intended as the reading audience of the Nueva coronica and how the bilingual technique might correspond to his purposes as an author.
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Books by Gregory Haimovich
2020 Podcast on New Books Network:
Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in C... more 2020 Podcast on New Books Network:
Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Colorado, 2017). Edited by David Tavárez.
Interviewer: Krzysztof Odyniec
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University of Warsaw, 2018
This guide is an attempt to systematize our knowledge of the early changes in Quechua lexicon tha... more This guide is an attempt to systematize our knowledge of the early changes in Quechua lexicon that were brought about by contact with Spanish language and culture. The language contact phenomena described here embrace the period from the beginning of sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, a time when Quechua was still dominant in Peru, in terms of numbers of speakers, and enjoyed a relatively high social status.
We hope that our work will be useful, as much for those scholars who specialize in the study of language contact, as for anthropologists and ethnohistorians who are particularly interested in Andean studies and the history of indigenous Latin America.
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Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past. Colonial Nahua and Quechua Elites in Their Own Words, 2018
Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past is a critical, annotated anthology of indigenous-aut... more Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past is a critical, annotated anthology of indigenous-authored texts, including the Nahua, Quechua, and Spanish originals, through which native peoples conveyed their own perspectives on different aspects and dimen- sions of postconquest life. It is the first volume to bring together native testimonies from two different areas of Spanish expansion in the Americas to examine comparatively these geographically and culturally distant realities of indigenous elites in the colonial period. In each chapter a particular document is transcribed exactly as it appears in the original manuscript or colonial printed document, with the editor placing it in historical context and considering the degree of European influence. These texts show the nobility through docu- ments they themselves produced or caused to be pro- duced—such as wills, land deeds, and petitions—and prioritize indigenous ways of expression, perspectives, and concepts. Together, the chapters demonstrate that native elites were independent actors as well as agents of social change and indigenous sustainability in colonial society. Additionally, the volume diversifies the commonly homogenous term “cacique” and recognizes the differences in elites throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes. Showcasing important and varied colonial genres
of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life.
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Drafts by Gregory Haimovich
The study of new lexical forms constitutes particular challenge when it concerns a language, whic... more The study of new lexical forms constitutes particular challenge when it concerns a language, which has been inadequately documented during its history. This work is aimed to show how, in presence of a scarce written corpus, it is possible to identify neologisms that merged in Southern Quechua as a result of the cross-cultural contact between Quechua and Spanish speakers. It explains how formal neologisms (new forms created solely by the means of indigenous inventory) can be distinguished from mere semantic changes in the traditional lexicon and how it is possible to define whether a neologism was created by a native speaker as a part of authentic cultural response or was coined in order to fulfill translation needs. My general purpose is to demonstrate how neologisms can be studied from the perspective of contact linguistics, and how theoretical considerations on neology that developed within terminology studies can aid in this task.
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Theses by Gregory Haimovich
The use of Indigenous languages of Americas in health services is a subject of concern both for t... more The use of Indigenous languages of Americas in health services is a subject of concern both for the speakers of these languages, many of whom are deprived of adequate health care, and for medical professionals, who seek to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers in order to provide such health care for Indigenous communities. According to the policies projected by UNESCO and WHO, access to health services in person’s first language is one of key linguistic human rights, however, little is being done to enact this right worldwide, especially when it concerns ethnic groups that have been long marginalized by mainstream Westernized society. Furthermore, the functional expansion of a language to such an important domain as health care should contribute to the prestige and usefulness of the language, which is crucial in the case of languages that face endangerment issues.
Be that as it may, the adaptation of an Indigenous language for the use in health services is quite a complicated task that requires close collaboration between researchers and members of the speech community, and a truly interdisciplinary approach that would include feedback from linguistics, sociolinguistics, social medicine and medical anthropology: concepts of health and illness that are present in Indigenous cultures usually differ significantly from those accepted in Western medicine, whereas the attitudes of the community towards their own health and well-being can be based on these concepts. Elderly members of the community in such a case are of major concern, since they: a) usually in greater need in effective health care; b) often insufficiently proficient in the language of majority; c) can possess Indigenous medical knowledge that is of imminent value for communal well-being but is often discredited by biomedical practitioners.
My dissertation is based on the participatory action research (PAR) that has been taking place in San Miguel Tenango, a Nahuatl-speaking community in Sierra Norte de Puebla, a region in Central Mexico. Both the dissertation and the PAR focus on three main issues. The first one is indigenous medical knowledge and practices in Tenango: their status and current use in the community, the attitudes of both community members and locally employed medical professionals towards them, as well as the linguistic and conceptual characteristics of such knowledge and practices, with a focus on the points of conceptual divergence between the indigenous and Western medicine. The second issue concerns the current practices related to the use of Nahuatl in public health services in Sierra Norte de Puebla; it includes, on the one hand, the analysis of current representations of Nahuatl in health education and language ideologies of health authorities and medical professionals who work in Indigenous communities. And finally, the third issue is the practical or ‘action’ aspect of the PAR: the preparation of educational materials in Nahuatl (written, audio and video) that deal with the most acute health problems in Tenango: diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, child malnutrition and dehydration and, in the view of recent developments, Covid-19 pandemic. The research draws theoretical feedback from such fields as language policy and planning, applied linguistics, medical anthropology and health communication. On the other hand, it aims to contribute to these fields by testing in practice a number of ideas and assumptions about the role of language in health, language revitalization and semantic nature of health-related knowledge. The dissertation is meant to present interest as to researchers who work in the above-mentioned fields as to grassroots activists concerned with the situation of human rights, health, and language vitality in their communities.
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Southern Quechua, or Quechua II-C, is the most widely spoken indigenous language of both Americas... more Southern Quechua, or Quechua II-C, is the most widely spoken indigenous language of both Americas, comprising up to six million speakers in Peru and Bolivia. It was long considered as the main language of the Inca Empire, and played an exceptional role in the evangelization of the Andean native population under the colonial rule. However, nowadays Southern Quechua faces the same problems as any other native American language, these being marginalized social status, aging of population of speakers, inaccessibility of education in first language – all what provides a permanent shift of speakers towards the language of majority, which is Spanish.
In the past few decades there have been various attempts to promote the status of Quechua both in Peru and Bolivia, and at the same time a number of institutions in the Andes and abroad have been occupied in the corpus planning of Southern Quechua, proposing renewed solutions for Quechua orthography, discussing possible models for the standardization of the language and innovating the Quechua lexicon in order to widen the functionality of the language. At the same time, these efforts have not yet achieved their goal, as the corpus planning of Southern Quechua as an organized process suffers from disregard from without (that is, on behalf of both Spanish and Quechua speakers) and from conflicts from within (among the planners themselves).
This work is aimed to examine the modern attempts of lexical elaboration of Southern Quechua, undertaken in different places by different institutions. The purpose of my research is not only to analyze the methods, which the agents of lexical modernization employ to produce new Quechua terms, but also to evaluate the existing strategies of putting these new lexemes in use. My work takes into account studies on the modern planning of Quechua, dictionaries and textbooks of Southern Quechua, as well as non-educational books, periodicals and other printed materials in the language, published in recent years. It also relies on the findings obtained during my stay in the region of Cusco in August-September 2013.
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Papers by Gregory Haimovich
Books by Gregory Haimovich
Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Colorado, 2017). Edited by David Tavárez.
Interviewer: Krzysztof Odyniec
We hope that our work will be useful, as much for those scholars who specialize in the study of language contact, as for anthropologists and ethnohistorians who are particularly interested in Andean studies and the history of indigenous Latin America.
of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life.
Drafts by Gregory Haimovich
Theses by Gregory Haimovich
Be that as it may, the adaptation of an Indigenous language for the use in health services is quite a complicated task that requires close collaboration between researchers and members of the speech community, and a truly interdisciplinary approach that would include feedback from linguistics, sociolinguistics, social medicine and medical anthropology: concepts of health and illness that are present in Indigenous cultures usually differ significantly from those accepted in Western medicine, whereas the attitudes of the community towards their own health and well-being can be based on these concepts. Elderly members of the community in such a case are of major concern, since they: a) usually in greater need in effective health care; b) often insufficiently proficient in the language of majority; c) can possess Indigenous medical knowledge that is of imminent value for communal well-being but is often discredited by biomedical practitioners.
My dissertation is based on the participatory action research (PAR) that has been taking place in San Miguel Tenango, a Nahuatl-speaking community in Sierra Norte de Puebla, a region in Central Mexico. Both the dissertation and the PAR focus on three main issues. The first one is indigenous medical knowledge and practices in Tenango: their status and current use in the community, the attitudes of both community members and locally employed medical professionals towards them, as well as the linguistic and conceptual characteristics of such knowledge and practices, with a focus on the points of conceptual divergence between the indigenous and Western medicine. The second issue concerns the current practices related to the use of Nahuatl in public health services in Sierra Norte de Puebla; it includes, on the one hand, the analysis of current representations of Nahuatl in health education and language ideologies of health authorities and medical professionals who work in Indigenous communities. And finally, the third issue is the practical or ‘action’ aspect of the PAR: the preparation of educational materials in Nahuatl (written, audio and video) that deal with the most acute health problems in Tenango: diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, child malnutrition and dehydration and, in the view of recent developments, Covid-19 pandemic. The research draws theoretical feedback from such fields as language policy and planning, applied linguistics, medical anthropology and health communication. On the other hand, it aims to contribute to these fields by testing in practice a number of ideas and assumptions about the role of language in health, language revitalization and semantic nature of health-related knowledge. The dissertation is meant to present interest as to researchers who work in the above-mentioned fields as to grassroots activists concerned with the situation of human rights, health, and language vitality in their communities.
In the past few decades there have been various attempts to promote the status of Quechua both in Peru and Bolivia, and at the same time a number of institutions in the Andes and abroad have been occupied in the corpus planning of Southern Quechua, proposing renewed solutions for Quechua orthography, discussing possible models for the standardization of the language and innovating the Quechua lexicon in order to widen the functionality of the language. At the same time, these efforts have not yet achieved their goal, as the corpus planning of Southern Quechua as an organized process suffers from disregard from without (that is, on behalf of both Spanish and Quechua speakers) and from conflicts from within (among the planners themselves).
This work is aimed to examine the modern attempts of lexical elaboration of Southern Quechua, undertaken in different places by different institutions. The purpose of my research is not only to analyze the methods, which the agents of lexical modernization employ to produce new Quechua terms, but also to evaluate the existing strategies of putting these new lexemes in use. My work takes into account studies on the modern planning of Quechua, dictionaries and textbooks of Southern Quechua, as well as non-educational books, periodicals and other printed materials in the language, published in recent years. It also relies on the findings obtained during my stay in the region of Cusco in August-September 2013.
Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Colorado, 2017). Edited by David Tavárez.
Interviewer: Krzysztof Odyniec
We hope that our work will be useful, as much for those scholars who specialize in the study of language contact, as for anthropologists and ethnohistorians who are particularly interested in Andean studies and the history of indigenous Latin America.
of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life.
Be that as it may, the adaptation of an Indigenous language for the use in health services is quite a complicated task that requires close collaboration between researchers and members of the speech community, and a truly interdisciplinary approach that would include feedback from linguistics, sociolinguistics, social medicine and medical anthropology: concepts of health and illness that are present in Indigenous cultures usually differ significantly from those accepted in Western medicine, whereas the attitudes of the community towards their own health and well-being can be based on these concepts. Elderly members of the community in such a case are of major concern, since they: a) usually in greater need in effective health care; b) often insufficiently proficient in the language of majority; c) can possess Indigenous medical knowledge that is of imminent value for communal well-being but is often discredited by biomedical practitioners.
My dissertation is based on the participatory action research (PAR) that has been taking place in San Miguel Tenango, a Nahuatl-speaking community in Sierra Norte de Puebla, a region in Central Mexico. Both the dissertation and the PAR focus on three main issues. The first one is indigenous medical knowledge and practices in Tenango: their status and current use in the community, the attitudes of both community members and locally employed medical professionals towards them, as well as the linguistic and conceptual characteristics of such knowledge and practices, with a focus on the points of conceptual divergence between the indigenous and Western medicine. The second issue concerns the current practices related to the use of Nahuatl in public health services in Sierra Norte de Puebla; it includes, on the one hand, the analysis of current representations of Nahuatl in health education and language ideologies of health authorities and medical professionals who work in Indigenous communities. And finally, the third issue is the practical or ‘action’ aspect of the PAR: the preparation of educational materials in Nahuatl (written, audio and video) that deal with the most acute health problems in Tenango: diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, child malnutrition and dehydration and, in the view of recent developments, Covid-19 pandemic. The research draws theoretical feedback from such fields as language policy and planning, applied linguistics, medical anthropology and health communication. On the other hand, it aims to contribute to these fields by testing in practice a number of ideas and assumptions about the role of language in health, language revitalization and semantic nature of health-related knowledge. The dissertation is meant to present interest as to researchers who work in the above-mentioned fields as to grassroots activists concerned with the situation of human rights, health, and language vitality in their communities.
In the past few decades there have been various attempts to promote the status of Quechua both in Peru and Bolivia, and at the same time a number of institutions in the Andes and abroad have been occupied in the corpus planning of Southern Quechua, proposing renewed solutions for Quechua orthography, discussing possible models for the standardization of the language and innovating the Quechua lexicon in order to widen the functionality of the language. At the same time, these efforts have not yet achieved their goal, as the corpus planning of Southern Quechua as an organized process suffers from disregard from without (that is, on behalf of both Spanish and Quechua speakers) and from conflicts from within (among the planners themselves).
This work is aimed to examine the modern attempts of lexical elaboration of Southern Quechua, undertaken in different places by different institutions. The purpose of my research is not only to analyze the methods, which the agents of lexical modernization employ to produce new Quechua terms, but also to evaluate the existing strategies of putting these new lexemes in use. My work takes into account studies on the modern planning of Quechua, dictionaries and textbooks of Southern Quechua, as well as non-educational books, periodicals and other printed materials in the language, published in recent years. It also relies on the findings obtained during my stay in the region of Cusco in August-September 2013.