El opúsculo “El mije y el zoque” de Bartolomé Mitre

Resumen

On a visit to Argentina, Carlos Navarrete was invited to use the Biblioteca Mitre. There he discovered a copy of a brief grammar of the Mixe and Zoque languages written by Bartolomé Mitre and published in 1895 in Buenos Aires. In his introduction, Navarrete describes the life of a political personage, who at the same time was known as the "bibliophile president" because of his collections of books that ranged over all aspects of the history, cultures and languages of the Americas. He concludes that the study of American languages in particular shows the extensive knowledge that Mitre had both of them and the ethnography of all of the Americas, a knowledge perhaps greater than that of any other ethnographer of his time. Mitre's linguistic study is based on the written sources available to him, but he adds original interpretations at times. The grammar reflects the linguistic interests of his times, but it touches on exclusive/inclusive pronouns, for example, as well as discussing the dialectology and genetic ties of the languages.