The dugulun (dialogue) and the coyaghtun (discourse) in Andrés Febrés’ Arte (1756): a legacy for Mapudungun

Abstract

Catalan Jesuit Andrés Febrés’ Art of the General Tongue of the Kingdom of Chile (1765) contains the earliest examples of two explicitly Mapuche discourse genres. These are the ‘dialogue between two chiefs’ or dungulun and the ‘discourse’ or coyaghtun. Despite the role they were given as exemplification or protreptic texts, it remains clear that religious biases and a gaze from linguistic and cultural othering have produced a reimagining of the interactions and communities they seek to portray. This ‘clean-up’ of the material raises questions about their value as testimonies to Mapuche language and culture of the time. In this article we propose a critical reading of the material in which we seek out – without denying foreign influence — the linguistic threads that may, with a modicum of certainty, be identified as part of contemporary speakers’ repertoires. This task is particularly relevant in current efforts to strengthen the role of textual sources in Mapudungun historical linguistics, that is, in establishing a philological tradition for the tongue. The novel method we propose entails the verification of historical linguistic material by contemporary native speakers of the language. As such, we present the results of a shared reading of the target texts, conducted by a historical linguist and a contemporary speaker. As a result, we highlight a series of under-described linguistic structures (lexicon, morphology, phonology, discourse) which show parallels between contemporary usage or lived memory and materials from over a quarter of a millennium ago.