The Lexicographical Heritage: Nineteenth Century Compilations and their Contribution to the Linguistics of the Bribri Language

Abstract

This article is part of an ongoing study on the edition and commentary of the Bribri documentation made by Walter Lehmann and his consultant Juan Salas in 1907-1908, the “Vokabularium der Bribri-Sprache”, which is preserved in a notebook in the library of the Iberoramerican Institute in Berlin (signature Y / 3009 [8]°). The text has been transcribed and edited and is presented together with a Spanish translation in the appendix to this volume. The study of the documentation establishes a graphematic equivalence for Lehmann’s phonetic alphabet and describes various phonetic-phonological traits observed in the vocabulary. The documentation and the research tradition in which it develops is contextualized in an earlier historical introduction through the most important early documentations of Bribri. Linguistic material found in this documentation is compared to both a modern description of the Bribri language and other early documentations (before 1907). It was possible to confirm some degree of phonological affinity between the documented form of the language and some other dialectal variant based on groups of phonetic-phonological traits verifiable in the early documentation and recurring in contemporary descriptions of diatopical variation. More data on the dialectal adscription of the language documented by Lehmann and other early researchers will emerge from a future analysis of the lexical corpus of the “Vokabularium”.