Details

Subjects:

Garifuna language -- Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
Indians of Central America -- Belize -- Languages.
Indians of Central America.
Garifuna language.
Belize.
Language and languages.
Indians of Central America -- Honduras -- Languages.
Honduras.
Belize -- Languages.
Honduras -- Languages.

Form/Genre:

Glossaries.
Manuscripts, Spanish.
Manuscripts, Latin American.
Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
Controlled vocabularies.

Language:

Spanish and Garifuna, with a few words in English.

Biography/History:

Born in 1804; served as Baptist missionary in British Honduras (Belize), beginning in 1835.

Summary:

A vocabulary list of approximately 640 entries, in Spanish and Garifuna (Caribe), written on a bifolium with pre-printed lines. The entries include numbers for counting 1 to 100. For correspondence between Alexander Henderson and C. Hermann Berendt concerning Henderson's preparation of this manuscript, and his mailing it to Berendt, see letters and drafts dated May to November 1871 in the folder of loose items shelved with Ms. Coll. 700, Item 127. According to the correspondence, Berendt provided Henderson with the prepared sheet, and requested that Henderson record on it approximately 600 vocabulary words of the Garifuna language. Evidently Berendt wrote out the Spanish words (actually numbering approximately 650) in the ruled columns, with the expectation that Henderson would fill in the Garifuna equivalents. Henderson did so, but in approximately 20 instances left the space for the Garifuna equivalent blank. In his letter of 30 May 1871 he comments that it was most difficult to provide the Garifuna for the names of animals and vegetables, and sometimes had to resort to a more generic term. At the tops of some of the columns (f. 1v, 2v) it is evident that Henderson added a few vocabulary entries of his own, using either Spanish or English, with the Garifuna equivalent. There are a few annotations in red ink that are likely by Berendt. The title Caribe (f. 1r) was provided by Berendt; Henderson himself favors the term Karif to refer to the language. Also in Berendt's hand is the following note at the head of the manuscript, which indicates that he intended to add this item to materials he was gathering for a comparative vocabulary: Materiales para el vocabulario comparativo de Dr. Berendt (N. 115 de su catálogo). Another note by Berendt (vertically along right margin, f. 2v) gives the address to which the manuscript was to be sent: Dr. C. Hermann Berendt, care of B. Westermann & Cie., P. O. Box No. 2306, New York. The manuscript was originally folded inside (tipped in) a 4-leaf sewn booklet with paper covers, bearing on the cover the title Caribe, the attribution to A. Henderson, and the date 1870 (the pages of the booklet are blank except for traces of a few, apparently unrelated words that have been erased); the booklet is stored in the same box as the manuscript.

Notes:

Ms. codex.
Title from caption title (f. 1r).
This was the seventh of 19 manuscripts formerly bound together, probably by Daniel Garrison Brinton, and now disbound (Items 129-136, 143, 145, 146, 151-155, and 157-159). The bound volume had the spine title: Languages of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Foliation: Paper, 2 ; [1-2]; bifolium.
Layout: Written in 52-54 lines, in 3 columns of equal width, established with 2 vertical lines ruled in red ink. In each vocabulary entry, the Spanish is followed by the Garifuna equivalent.
Script: Written in the hands of C. Hermann Berendt (Spanish entries) and Alexander Henderson (Garifuna equivalents).
Origin: Written in Belize (at that time part of British Honduras) in May 1871 (letters from Henderson, 16 and 30 May 1871, shelved with Ms. Coll. 700, Item 127).

Penn Provenance:

From the collection of C. Hermann Berendt, later acquired by Daniel Garrison Brinton (ex libris stamp on the verso of front free endpaper in the bound volume that once contained the present item).

Cited in:

Described in Brinton, Daniel Garrison. Catalogue of the Berendt Linguistic Collection (Department of Archaeology and Paleontology, University of Pennsylvania, 1900), p. 27 (no. 135).
Described in Weeks, John M. "Karl Hermann Berendt: Colección de manuscritos lingüistícos de Centroamérica y Mesoamérica," Mesoamérica 36 (Dec. 1998), p. 658 (no. 94).
Described in Weeks, John M. The Library of Daniel Garrison Brinton (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2002), p. 68-70 (no. 388, document 7).

Cited as:

UPenn Ms. Coll. 700, Item 135

Contributor:

Berendt, C. Hermann (Carl Hermann), 1817-1878, former owner.
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison), 1837-1899, former owner.

OCLC:

537153748