At the III Congress of the Argentine Delegation of the Linguistics and Philology Association of Latin America (Alfal) the two scholars presented an analysis of the documentation of the Selk'nam language made by Sister Gutiérrez, who compiled a vocabulary, alphabetically ordered, of about one thousand expressions, emphasizing the importance of this register for the knowledge of female language in that period.
In a culture dominated by men and where the vision of women was limited to their domestic service, these documents represent a true treasure; the Salesian nun was able and knew how to integrate culture and reality, science and daily life, with her work. "Sr. Gutiérrez's documentation was intuitive, had few metalinguistic tools and was based on perceptions influenced by the phonetics of Spanish. However, in that 'land of men', Sister Gutiérrez created a register with features that set it apart from those of its male Salesian contemporaries," says Dr. Nicoletti. This conclusion emerges in fact from a comparison with the parallel registers made in those years, on that same language, by the Salesian priests Giovanni Zenone, Fortunato Griffa and Giuseppe Beauvoir.
In their research the authors describe the context in which the register was drawn up, based on sources of the time and in the light of a new historiographical vision of gender.
In the Selk'nam language, gender is a very important category; Nicoletti and Malvestitti confirm the hypothesis that Sister Gutiérrez had noticed gender variations in the oral reports of her interlocutors. "It is not really a 'generoletto' in the socio-linguistic sense (a linguistic variety typical of a genre, Ed.), since the grammatical signs are obligatory; but her collection gives access to this morphology which, in other registers of the time, is influenced according to the expressions of male speakers," explained Dr. Malvestitti.
According to Dr. Nicoletti, "the linguistic interest developed by Sister Gutiérrez was, it seems, something extraordinary."
The participation of the FMA as a compiler was highlighted by Antonio Tonelli in his Grammar and glossary of the language of the Ona-Selknám of Tierra del Fuego published in 1926, where the first mention of the Quaderno de palabras onas (Book of Onas words) vocabulary appeared.
Source: El Ciudadano Web
