A Manuscript by Carlos Spegazzini with Unpublished Data on the Haush Language

Abstract

Between 1881 and 1882, the Italian naturalist Carlos L. Spegazzini (1858-1926) joined the Italo-Argentinian expedition led by Giacomo Bove to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. He collected Fuegian language materials near Ushuaia in 1882, some of which were later published in different publications. In this article, we present a manuscript entitled “Ona-Yahgna-Alacaluf vocabulary by Dr. Spegazzini” that was copied by Samuel Lafone Quevedo in 1899 and was found in his personal archive. It consists of 42 pages that include vocabulary and phrasal forms, mostly in three columns. Each contains data from the Ona, Yahgan and Alacaluf languages. We focus on the Ona data collected by Spegazzini, (which are actually not in Selknam but in Haush, the least known language of the Chonan linguistic family) which have remained unpublished until now, and considerably increase our knowledge of this language. A better knowledge of Haush will, in turn, expand the historical-comparative research into the Chonan languages as well as the study of loan words and other possible phenomena of linguistic diffusion among the indigenous languages of Tierra del Fuego.