Patagonian Lexicography (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

The Italian navigator Antonio de Pigafetta (1480–1540) compiled a vocabulary containing ninety Patagonian terms (Tehuelche) in San Julian’s bay in 1520. In the same bay but in 1780 explorer Antonio de Viedma (1737–1809) wrote a vocabulary of 185 terms. In another expedition nine years later, in 1789, Alessandro Malaspina (1754–1809) compiled two brief vocabularies on the Patagonian language and in 1791 Lieutenant Juan José de Elizalde (?-?) wrote a longer one. The analysis of these vocabularies will include (a) context of compilation, (b) extension, (c) semantic fields and (d) transcription, distribution and organization of lexemes. We will also compare these 19th-century vocabularies with those of Pigafetta’s (1520), Pineda’s (1789) and Elizalde’s (1791).