Details

Other Title:

Ulua

Subjects:

Ulva language -- Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
Indians of Central America -- Nicaragua -- Languages.
Indians of Central America.
Language and languages.
Nicaragua -- Languages.
Nicaragua.

Form/Genre:

Glossaries.
Manuscripts, English.
Manuscripts, Latin American.
Controlled vocabularies.

Language:

English and Ulva, with some notes in Spanish (leaf tipped in, p. 5).

Biography/History:

German geographer who emigrated to the United States following the failed 1848 revolution, and travelled to Nicaragua in 1850 as a correspondent of the New York Tribune.

Summary:

C. Hermann Berendt's transcription of 56 vocabulary entries, including the numbers 1 to 10, in English and Ulva (Ulua, Woolwa), as collected by Julius Fröbel in 1851 among the Ulva Indians in the Chontales department of Nicaragua, around the source of the Bluefields, or Escondido River, and conveyed by E. G. Squier in his two-volume work Nicaragua, its people, scenery, monuments, and the proposed interoceanic canal, published in 1852 (New York: D. Appleton & Co.; vol. 2, p. 324-325). In a note on the title page, Berendt calls attention to the fact that, while Squier, in the body of his text, had tentatively named the language Chondal, after the department of Chontales where it was spoken, he later corrected himself when he wrote the preface (Squier, vol. 1, p. xxii); there he states that Fröbel's vocabulary represents the language of the Woolwa Indians. Except for the rearrangement of the order of the entries so that the numbers appear at the end of the list, Berendt's version appears to correspond exactly to the published one, and is free of annotations (the question marks that appear next to a few of the words were in the published version). Also included is a sheet of notes by Berendt (tipped in, p. 5), dated March 1872, pertaining to Pablo Lévy's work Notas geográficas y económicas sobre la República de Nicaragua (1873), including a vocabulary list, most entries of which are transcribed from a list in Lévy's book (p. 298). Berendt gives English rather than Spanish equivalents; and makes comparisons to Ulva words from Fröbel in red ink. Lévy identified the vocabulary only in a general way, as the language of Indians among whom he had lived, calling them Carib. Berendt considered it to belong to the language of the Ulva Indians; for his more formal transcription and presentation of the vocabulary from Levy, including a comparison to Fröbel's vocabulary, see Ms. Coll. 700, Item 145. Two further leaves of notes (tipped in, p. 6) comprise a list of words under the heading: Words in common use in Nicaragua; the accompanying page references indicate that Berendt culled these words from other sections of Lévy's work; he provides English explanations of their meanings.

Notes:

Ms. codex.
Title from title page (p. 1).
This was the ninth 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.
Pagination: Paper ii + 3 + i leaves; [1-3], 4, [5-6]; contemporary pagination in ink, upper center. 3 leaves are tipped in (one on p. 5; 2 on p. 6).
Layout: Written in 2 columns of 27-29 lines, with English on the left and Ulva on the right.
Script: Written in the hand of C. Hermann Berendt.
Decoration: 3 small line drawings in ink (leaf tipped in, p. 6), illustrating items used in food preparation in Nicaragua: the stone griddle (comal) on which tortillas are made; the stone on which maize is ground (metate), and the stone muller, or pestle, used to grind the maize on the metate (metakil?).
Binding: Contemporary paper covers; sewn.
Origin: Probably written ca. 1872 (leaf tipped in, p. 5).

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. 15 (no. 146).
Described in Weeks, John M. "Karl Hermann Berendt: Colección de manuscritos lingüistícos de Centroamérica y Mesoamérica," Mesoamérica 36 (Dec. 1998), p. 655 (no. 85).
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 9).

Cited as:

UPenn Ms. Coll. 700, Item 146

Contributor:

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

OCLC:

536881904