Details

Other Title:

Darien--Cunacuna

Subjects:

Cuna language -- Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
Indians of Central America -- Panama -- Languages -- Early works to 1800.
Indians of Central America.
Language and languages.
Cuna language.
Panama -- Languages.
Panama.

Form/Genre:

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

Language:

Spanish and a dialect of Cuna, with a quoted passage in German.

Summary:

C. Hermann Berendt's transcription of a vocabulary of 19 words, including the numbers 1 to 10, in Spanish and a dialect said to be that of the Cunacuna Indians (i.e. Cuna, or Kuna), taken from Adriano Balbi's Atlas ethnographique du Globe (Paris, 1826), table XLI, no. 616, the source of which, as Berendt further notes, is described with the phrase: selon le viajero; in pencil Berendt indicates his assumption that the source meant is: Pedro Estala, El viagero universal, a multi-volume work published in Madrid around 1799. (Berendt makes reference to this vocabulary from Balbi, and to Estala's work as its presumed source, in a paper entitled The Darien language, delivered before the American Ethnological Society in November 1873, and published in American Historical Record, vol. 3, no. 26, Feb. 1874, p. 54-59.) Following the vocabulary, Berendt inserts (tipped in, f. 3r; labeled: ad Chocó) a quotation that he copied from Oscar Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (1858, p. 453), in which Peschel paraphrases a report from Colonel Agustín Codazzi, published in the Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde (vol. 1, 1856, p. 257-258); Peschel (citing Codazzi) notes that the tribes of the Cuna living on both coasts of the Isthmus of Darien (eastern Panama) and in the province of Chocó, west of the mouth of the Atrato River, and who may venture on the Pacific side as far as the Bay of San Miguel, have, in the time since explorers first came upon them, retained their way of life and still live in nakedness.

Notes:

Ms. component part.
Title from component title page (f. 1r).
Item 167, in contemporary paper covers, is the fourth of 15 manuscripts (Items 162-165, 167-171, 172-175, 218, and 219) bound together in a volume with the spine title: Languages of Chiriqui and Darien.
Foliation: Paper, 6; ii (paper endleaves) + 3 + i (paper endleaf). Partial leaf tipped in (f. 3).
Layout: Vocabulary written in two columns, with Spanish on the left and a dialect of Cuna on the right.
Script: Written in the hand of C. Hermann Berendt.
Watermark: PIRIE'S Old Style.
Origin: Written ca. 1873, probably in New York.

Penn Provenance:

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

Cited in:

Described in Brinton, Daniel Garrison. Catalogue of the Berendt Linguistic Collection (Department of Archaeology and Paleontology, University of Pennsylvania, 1900), p. 30 (no. 167).
Described in Weeks, John M. "Karl Hermann Berendt: Colección de manuscritos lingüistícos de Centroamérica y Mesoamérica," Mesoamérica 36 (Dec. 1998), p. 654 (no. 79).
Described in Weeks, John M. The Library of Daniel Garrison Brinton (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2002), p. 67-68 (no. 387, document 4).

Cited as:

UPenn Ms. Coll. 700, Item 167

Contributor:

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

Contains:

Balbi, Adriano, 1782-1848. Atlas ethnographique du Globe.
Peschel, Oscar, 1826-1875. Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen.

OCLC:

710835724