La intertextualidad como recurso en la lingüística misionera: El prefacio del <em>Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala</em> (1610) de fray Francisco Blancas de San José

Abstract

In this paper I analyze the Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala, the oldest extant grammar of Tagalog, not as a mere collection of morphological and syntactic rules of the language, but rather as an example of cultural translation. My study is limited to the preface of the book and the intertextual references contained therein. Focus will be given to the Arte’s contrastive content, which establishes a network of equivalences between Tagalog and Latin through Castilian Spanish as metalanguage, and provides clues as to how texts were generally produced during the period. I argue that the translational principles propounded in the preface of the Arte inscribe the cultural knowledge on the colonized subjects within the colonizer’s tradition and epistemology, and that they link such knowledge to the more extensive narrative of the history of Christian redemption and the prevailing linguistic thought in the West.

Keywords: Tagalog, missionary linguistics, inter textuality, translation, Philippines