American River Names

Rick Mc Callister rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu
Tue Apr 10 09:21:56 UTC 2001


	Actually, Argentine Indian languages of the Tupi-Guarani family
were the source of a relatively large number of loanwords --although not as
many as from Nahuatl. Many are local words but others are universal. If you
add Runa and Atmara, spoken in a large area of NW Argentina, the number is
much larger. These areas were the densely populated areas during colonial
times.
	Colonial Argentina also had close commerical and political contacts
with Peru and Bolivia. It was under the Vice-Royalty of Lima and supplied
horses, mules, dried beef, tallow and hides for the Andean region.
	Massive immigration from Europe began well after independence and
while immigrants did contribute to Argentine Spanish, they also continued
to use the loanwords from indigenous languages.

>Population density did matter in most of the Spanish Empire; note the number
>of Nahuatl words in Mexican Spanish, as compared to the relative absence of
>loan-words in, say, Argentina.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701



More information about the Indo-european mailing list