Brief history of the Guarani language |
The
pre-Columbian era
The
European arrive
The
writing begins
The
Guarani in the independence
The Guarani in the independence |
After the departure of the Jesuits, most of the aborigens who integrated the missions continued with the communitarian and autonomous method of work that they had developing, and went gradually being inserted to the society of the Province of Paraguay. There were also aborigens who returned to the forests on having been left by their tutors. A few decades later already libertarian airs were breathed. |
One of the great leaders of the independent Paraguay was Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, known as "The Supreme one". Theologian and lawyer, this man caused respect by his talent, justice and uprightness. Dr. Francia led to Paraguay to passing along the autosufficient economy, supporting the peasants and the poor. It abolished the Encomienda and other oppressive regulations to the aborigens, established the free school education, egalitarian for men and women, though this educational homogeneity was not much practised. |
In what here it concerns us, nevertheless, apparently France did not apply well his talent, since it forced a population for the most part guarani speaking, to an education developed exclusively in Spanish. And this drove again the Guarani to be maintained in the orality. |
The curious thing of this is that Francia loved Guarani: when it was presented to him the letter of what would be the first Paraguayan National Anthem, rejected it "because being written in Spanish, language of chapetones"[1], and later he approved Tetã Purahéi (The Song of the Country), written by Anastacio Rolón, native to Caraguatay, not allowing its official translation. This one was known as "the Dr. Francia's Anthem", and the version in Spanish was had only after his death. |
Rodríguez of Francia left at his death a sovereign and immensely rich, but completely isolated country. His successor, Carlos Antonio López, changed this politics for the sake of the modernization. He hired hundreds of engineers and technical personnel from Europe, and sent Paraguayans (only men) to be instructed there: the result was a large scale industrialization, financed with internal resources. On this he accompanied a cultural revolution without precedents, though for the most part masculine. |
But López definitively was not a lover of Guarani. Teaching and education in general should be given only in Spanish. All the books, newspapers and magazines, likewise, had to be printed only on Spanish. It even came to the height ordering to replace all the Guarani names and surnames of the population, via law, by others which were of Spanish origin: it was the death of the identity of the Guarani clans. |
Nonetheless, subdued, the internal forces of the autochthonous tongue did not subside. The Paraguayan women, who were least affected by the imposed educational system, continued educating their children in Guarani. Luckily, the law could not join the hearths, and paradoxically, the patriotism was forged from there, with the sweet maternal lullaby in Guarani. |
Francisco Solano López, son of the previous one and became to Marshall degree, was the next president of Paraguay. This gentleman, who studied in Europe, recognized the Guarani language as national wealth, and he used it in all his speeches. During his presidency, Paraguay had to live through a bloody war, called "of the Triple Alliance" (1865-1870), against a coalition formed by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. |
During this war the Guarani acquired preponderant relevancy. It was used profusely by the press and in the military communications. The same government of Mcal. López, opposite to the actions of its predecessor, encouraged bilingual publications, and thus they appeared new newspapers that with pleasure made shine the Guarani soul, publishing poetry which tried to encourage the Paraguayan people who was bleeding in torrents. The Guarani was implanted as a factor of union and consolation. |
The lack of uniformity in the spelling, especially for using in the telegraph where the speed was important, did that in 1867 an elite was meeting at Paso Pucú, solicited by Mcal. López. An urgent Congress of Graphia conformed this way, to establish procedures of writing with a unified alphabet which immediately was in use in such Guarini Guasu (Large War). In this group Juan Crisóstomo Centurión and Luis Camino stood out. |
The population of Paraguay, from 1,300,000 at beginnings of that war, was reduced to about 200,000 at its ending, and of those, only 10 % was masculine, almost all of them elders and children who could not go to battle front. Also it lost great part of its territory, which became a part of Argentina and Brazil, zones of Guarani spoken until today. It was as well as Paraguay, from the great wealth, went to the extreme poverty. |
Finished this war, and under the economic dominion of the foreigners (Argentinians, Brazilians and English) who introduced their capital on the Paraguay territory to destroy its natural resources and to use cheap female manpower, the Guarani is pursued again, for not being the language of the new owners of grounds. The Argentinian Domingo F. Sarmiento was assigned to checking the school program, in a manner that "the wild tongue" remains out of it, and Paraguay could join again to "the civilization". |
As it was to be expected, the population did not accompany the small ruling elite, which was selling his ground and trampling on his tongue. Being the Guarani the only resource not destroyed by the war, it continued fishtailing between the continuous attacks of which it was object: the adjective "guarango" meant "savage who speaks Guarani". As result, the speakers of Guarani in general detested this foreign schooling and again the Guarani recaptured the tenacious orality of which it was always proud. |
At beginning of the 20th century there appear shyly some publications transmitting the Guarani thought, principally in form of poetries and popular songs, and then appears theatrical works by Julio Correa, great interpreter of the rural thought. A great gang of popular authors went out to light, many of them using a very pure Guarani, barely with certain necessary hispanicisms, whereas others have used the expressiveness of the Guarani with whole phrases in Spanish, speech known as "yopará"[2 (from jopara, which means mixture). |
The yopará started establishing oneself this way very hard in written matter, unfortunately with popular admission, for desperation of the Guaranian linguists and those who adored the genuine autochthonous tongue. This ugly way of speaking, divulged by the citydwellers who presumed to speak Guarani, has been transmitted since then by the mass media, degenerating the native beauty. |
Since 1932 Paraguay undergoes again another war, this time against Bolivia, before recovering of the previous one. Known as the "War of the Chaco", this one there was caused by a American petroleum company located at Bolivia, who wanted to prevent another German one from exploring the Paraguay territory in search of oil. Supported because of it, the Bolivians invaded the Chaco in Paraguay. |
The Paraguayans, on having seen they were being sacrificed by completely foreign interests, they sheltered in the Guarani tongue again, and another poetical heyday saw the light, where the principal topic was the patriotism and the defense of the mother land: for the songs, they are those of the Chakore purahéi (songs about the Chaco). |
It is narrated that certain occasion the Bolivian army went to an aborigen, also Bolivian, for the interpretation of Paraguayans messages intercepted by radio. This man, on having recognized the tongue as his, suffered a nervous attack (real or simulated), of such a magnitude that could not translate anything. Such it was the union and loyalty the Guarani was producing among its speakers. |
The war used again the Guarani to confuse the enemy, and when finishing, with 50,000 Paraguayan and 80,000 Bolivians of less, Paraguay did not recover all its original territory, but it remained with poetical anthology full of histories and hopes. And, once again, the Paraguay government continued then ignoring it in the schools and universities, for several decades more. |
In the middle of last century, a Spanish priest, Antonio Guasch, great follower of Anchieta and Montoya, publishes his own investigations about Guarani. His work consists of a totally complete grammar, El Idioma Guarani, to which soon he added an anthology in prose and verse; and Diccionario castellano-guaraní y guaraní-castellano. Guasch contributed several ideas to the grammatical nomenclature, which time after they were officially adopted. |
Also by the same epoch, Anselmo Jover Peralta assembles the Guarani vocabulary and the notes of Guarani grammar left for Tomás Osuna at his death, enriches them, adds some appendices, and publishes the Diccionario guaraní-español y español-guaraní. In the preface of this work, Peralta complained about the sad luck of the Guarani of this epoch. |
At last, the National Constitution of Paraguay in 1967 recognizes the existence of the Guarani, but the official language continues being Spanish. Even so, an official diffusion of the language begins slowly. Years later some institutes start teaching it with the support of the Ministry of Education, to what it would continue at the secondary education as complementary matters, and the politicians in shift were using all over -just as today- the yopará in his proselytizing campaigns. |
In 1989 Paraguay goes out of a long dictatorship, and the next National Constitution (1992) already recognizes the Guarani as official language of the country, at the same level as Spanish. Immediately his obligatory use is implanted in the school basic education, and then at the secondary level, with a bilingual education. The Guarani has been vindicated. |
There has been criticized very much the way in which the educational authorities of Paraguay are handling at present the teaching of this tongue. This, principally as for the enrichment of the vocabulary: there is who detest the generation of neologisms "in laboratories", and others who do not see with good eyes the increasing wave of hispanicisms from the popular Guarani, the yopará, which uses nonexistent letters in the Guarani alphabet, and mainlly, commit an outrage against the syllabic structure of the original Guarani. |
[1] Chapetón,a: Contemptuous adjetive for the newly arrived European. Plural form: "chapetones".
[2] Yopará: This is the Spanished form of the word. Though in Guarani Jopara originally means "mixture, miscellany", today it is most used to name a "dialect", some people thinking as a "third language": Guarani and Spanish mixed, using the Guarani syntax.
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