Faculty Profile: Christian Ruvalcaba

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Professor Christian Ruvalcaba of Languages and Applied Linguistics was awarded THI’s Faculty Research Fellowship for 2024-2025 to work on his Lost Vocabulary Project.

This research involves the transcription, description, and analysis of a previously lost 17th-century Jesuit manuscript on Opata Tegüima, a dormant Indigenous language of northern Mexico. The recently rediscovered manuscript is a dictionary for a language that otherwise lacks significant primary sources. We spoke with Professor Ruvalcaba to hear more about this exciting work.


Hi Professor Ruvalcaba! Thanks for chatting with us about your THI Faculty Research Fellowship, to start off could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?

Thank you for letting me share a bit about the work I’ve been doing! I am an assistant professor in the Languages and Applied Linguistics department as well as the director of the Applied Linguistics program. I teach in the Applied Linguistics and the Spanish Studies programs. I’m originally from Sonora, Mexico but immigrated to southern Arizona in 1994. So, I mainly grew up in Sierra Vista, a city near Tombstone and Nogales. I think a lot of my research interests stem from living in that area. 

My work has focused on the syntax of Spanish, English, and, more recently, Teguima, also known as Opata or Ore, a dormant Indigenous language from Sonora, Mexico. I’m also interested in Spanish as a heritage language, specifically looking at place-based learning activities and, more broadly, the role of community spaces in sustaining minoritized languages in the borderlands and other contested spaces. In recent years, I started helping with a revitalization project of the Opata languages, Teguima and Eudeve, along with my colleague Michael Everdell. This involves working with several community members in the U.S. and Mexico who identify as Opatas or as descendants of Opatas and who want to recover their language. Part of this project also involves examining the few surviving texts on Opata in order to further describe and analyze the language. 

Your project sounds fascinating! Could you also talk more about the specific project you are focusing on for the THI Faculty Research Fellowship and the significance of this work both for academic knowledge and Indigenous communities?

The project I am working on for the fellowship involves transcribing and annotating a 17th-century manuscript on the Teguima language. This is a collaborative project I am doing with Dr. Tesiu Rosas-Xelhuantzi, a researcher at the Biblioteca Nacional de México (National Library of Mexico) in Mexico City. The manuscript is stored there at the National Library, and it includes a vocabulary that was generally unknown until very recently. It is essentially a Spanish to Teguima translation dictionary that also includes details about verb conjugations and some descriptions that provide interesting cultural context about the terms. 

The goal of our work is to publish this vocabulary as a book with introductory chapters that analyze the manuscript and develop new research on the understudied language. The fellowship activities also include writing independent research papers that draw from this vocabulary to gain new insights into the grammar and sounds of the language. At the moment, we are still transcribing and analyzing the text entry by entry. Ultimately, this work aims to help with the revitalization efforts. One of the challenges in the revitalization project has been getting access to the available information about the Opata languages. Not only are there few existing resources, but they are also spread out across different countries, throughout various libraries and collections. 

One of the most well-known primary sources of the Teguima language is an Arte, or grammatical description, developed in the 17th century by a Jesuit priest named Natal Lombardo. There are four known copies of the printed Arte, and one pre-publication manuscript, but these were mainly accessible to researchers until the 1990s when a microfilm of Lombardo’s Arte was created by the National Library of Scotland. This microfilm was later published in book form in Mexico by Ignacio Guzmán Betancourt of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History). However, this book has gone out of print and has become difficult to acquire. 

“Arte de la lengua Teguima vulgarmente llamada Opata / compvesta por Natal Lombardo de la Compañía de Jesús.” 1702. Bancroft Library/University Archives. BNEG Box 574:19. Berkeley, CA.  

This Arte has been the main source of our understanding of Teguima, and we believe that the vocabulary we are analyzing was written by the same Jesuit priest. There are other texts on Teguima, mainly religious texts and word lists, written in later centuries and in different regions of Sonora. But it is difficult to compare them to the Arte because we don’t know whether to attribute differences across the texts to different regional varieties, to language change, or to some other feature about the language or pronunciation of the language. However, having two texts written in the same region and by the same person is useful because it shows us variation within the same place and time. This can help give us a clearer picture of the pronunciations and meanings of each word. 

For that reason, we are hoping that this newly described text will not only fill in some gaps in our understanding of the language but also bring more widespread attention to revitalization efforts and the need to make existing sources of the language more accessible. We are hoping to publish this book in a way that makes it free online. We are also planning to provide copies of the physical book to rural libraries in the Opata territory of Sonora as well as coordinating in-person workshops or talks in Sonora that are connected to this manuscript and other revitalization projects. 

A previously lost manuscript sounds very intriguing, could you talk more about how it was discovered? And is this something common in your field?

It was very surprising to me because I started working on this language before we knew where the manuscript was. I knew of its existence because Natal Lombardo mentioned it in the first sentence of his Arte: “Having concluded in recent years the vocabulary of this language, considering later on that a copy of the words is not enough… I decided to take on another major work and create an Arte…” This completed vocabulary mentioned in the Arte has led many researchers to speculate about its whereabouts. Even I would occasionally look for traces of it online. 

The linguist Jane Rosenthal searched for the manuscript from the late eighties to the late nineties. Her papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia show her attempts to track down the lost vocabulary by studying the paper trail of existing documents on the Opata languages. 

After examining countless manuscripts, books, maps, bibliographies, Jesuit documents, and personal correspondence, investigating archives and private libraries in Chicago, St. Louis, Edinburgh, the Vatican, Puebla, and Mexico City, consulting with linguists, historians, librarians, and private book collectors, and carrying out handwriting and comparative vocabulary analyses, she confided the following in a letter to a friend: “The great mystery surrounds the fate of Lombardo’s vocabulary which he said he had done before the arte… There is still no solid evidence that the vocabulary was ever printed…” She also wrote that the vocabulary is mentioned in several bibliographies, but none of them provide many details or seem to verify its existence first-hand. 

In her search, she detailed the origin of known manuscripts and their journeys from convents in Mexico City to a Mexican historian’s library and on through a German bookseller, an American ethnologist, until ending up at the Newberry Library in Chicago or in the private library of the 29th Earl of Crawford in Scotland. She located a fragment from an unidentified Vocabulary stored at the National Archives in Mexico City, but it turned out to be pages of an Eudeve vocabulary, a language closely related to Teguima (Opata) that had at some point been separated from a manuscript in Paris. In the end, Rosenthal never found the text, but her search and her collaboration with the Mexican linguist Roberto Escalante led to the publication of the Arte for the first time since 1702. 

“AGN Manuscript and Lombardo.” “Jane Rosenthal Papers,” Series 2 Subseries 3. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

The origins of other versions of the Arte are less clear, although we know they ended up in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, in the Biblioteca Nacional de México (National Library of Mexico) in Mexico City, and in Guadalajara. The version in Mexico City came from predecessor of UNAM and was described as incomplete. In addition to this, the National Library also had a short-handwritten manuscript that was described in 1966 by a researcher as a copy of the first part of Lombardo’s Arte manuscript. In 2020, Dr. Tesiu Rosas-Xelhuantzi was working on updating the descriptions of manuscripts at the National Library of Mexico, and he examined the manuscript more closely. He discovered that there was a lot that the previous researcher had missed. 

First, the text was not a copy of the first part of the Arte but rather an earlier, condensed draft of it. In addition. Dr. Rosas-Xelhuantzi found that the second half of the manuscript, starting on the 50th folio, is actually a vocabulary of “the Ore language, or of this this Valley or Province of Sonora.” On one of the occasions I was searching for more information about this vocabulary, I stumbled upon a chapter Dr. Rosas Xelhuantzi had published. In it, he presented the results of a preliminary analysis of the text. It determined that the pages were likely produced in the second half of the 17th century in Geneva. I wrote to him, and he told me that he had been trying to get in contact with someone working on the language but had not been able to find anyone. Since then, we started to collaborate. He has analyzed the handwriting of the manuscript and compared it to the handwriting in the personal correspondence of Natal Lombardo. I have been comparing the words, including spelling and meaning, to words in the Arte and to related languages to confirm the language is indeed Teguima. In December, it was added to UNESCO´s Memory of the World Register.

In your proposal, you described studying the “morphosyntax” of the Nahua language. Could you explain what that means for those outside of your field?

In my proposal, I mentioned the morphosyntax of Teguima. This refers to the parts of a word (morphology) and their relation to the rest of the words in a sentence (syntax). For example, cross linguistically many sentences minimally include a subject (e.g., he slept) or a subject and object (e.g., he read a book), depending on the verb in the sentence. The same is true in Teguima. In Teguima, however, when the verb has the suffix –da, it introduces another participant in the sentence (apart from the subject and object). For example, the verb hio or hiosa means to write something. When you add the –da suffix, hiosida, the verb now means to write something for someone. The addition of the –da, in other words, introduces another participant in the writing event, a participant that benefits from the writing. This is called an applicative suffix because it applies another participant or argument to the event (a similar thing happens in Spanish when you add a ‘le’ before or after the verb). I am interested in how this –da suffix interacts with other suffixes, such as a causative suffix –tuda, and how the ordering of these suffixes relates to the word order in the sentence. I am comparing these constructions to similar constructions in Hiaki or Yaqui, a related language in Sonora, because it has a similar syntax to Teguima and it has been researched a lot more. The vocabulary text generally includes the applicative and causative form of each verb, so it has been helpful. I am also interested in looking at sentences in later sources of Teguima to see if this construction changed over time. 

Also, keeping readers outside of linguistics in mind, can you describe what this kind of work looks like? What skills are required to analyze texts with a linguistic lens? 

Being multilingual is helpful for doing this work. Apart from Teguima, the vocabulary we are working on includes Spanish, Latin, and occasional borrowings from other Indigenous languages, like Nahuatl. In the Arte, the priest, Natal Lombardo, also compares the sounds of Teguima to the sounds in other languages, including Italian, French, and Greek. He explains that when a letter has two dots above it (i.e., ä, ï) the vowel is pronounced twice “giving more time for pronunciation, as it occurs in the French language.” Nevertheless, these comparisons and descriptions of a long vowel don’t give us a complete understanding of the sound. One has to consider that French in the 1600s was different than it is now, and there are no audio recordings of that older variety either. In fact, one linguist has argued that this does not really represent a long vowel but a completely different sound. So, we have to fill in the gaps in other ways, such as comparing Teguima words across and within each text, and also comparing them to equivalent words in other languages (i.e., cognants) that belong to the same family and are still spoken today. 

Even as a Spanish speaker, it can at times be challenging to understand the older variety of Spanish used in these texts. The vocabulary’s word choices, its spelling, and orthographic conventions are considerably different than what is used today. Another challenge is that the terminology for grammatical terms is sometimes used differently than it is now. In the process of doing this work, you end up learning a lot about the orthographic patterns, word choices, and concepts that were common at the time but may seem archaic to modern speakers. You also learn a lot about the genres of artes, vocabularies, and religious documents, during this time particular period and region. The work also ends up requiring an understanding of the background and motivations of the missionary who wrote the document, in other words the historical, political, cultural, and geographic context of the manuscript and its author. 

In short, even if you’re multilingual and have some familiarity with several branches of linguistics (i.e., syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics), there are still a lot of other skills needed to be able to get a clear picture of what is going on in the text. While we had to learn a lot of new ideas and methodologies, we also relied a lot on the help of other people. I have benefited immensely from my collaboration with Dr. Rosas-Xelhuantzi. The process has also benefited from the help of other archivists and scholars in applied linguistics, historical linguistics, history, anthropology, southwest studies, and other fields. It also includes the help of community members, like Jesus Acuña, a recent graduate of linguistics at Arizona State University, who has helped in a variety of ways, including deciphering some of the Latin phrases and abbreviations in the text. It also includes the help of UCSC undergraduate students like Alfredo Alcantar, Daniela Gil, and Alexander Clemente, who have worked with me on this project. 

Thinking about your upcoming book, what has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this work? And what are your hopes for the publication?

For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of this work is that the book can be a resource for people trying to revitalize the language. Some folks working on revitalizing the language are working on a collaborative online dictionary. My hope is that this new resource can contribute to that project by providing new words, meanings, and pronunciations. Also, it has always been a goal of mine to work on Opata because it is connected to the area where I grew up. I look forward to sharing this work with the communities in Sonora, Mexico. 

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