The latin model in the first descriptions of the Mapudungun language: heritage and innovation in colonial-missionary linguistics

Abstract This article describes and explains the use of the comparative paradigm in the study of the Mapudungun language, which took Latin as a model because it was a prestigious language and because it had a strong grammatical tradition. In particular, the paper analyzes the procedures to describe the Mapuche language in the missionary grammars, in relation to the missionaries’ linguistic experimentation. For illustrative purposes, the grammatical category ‘noun’ is used and the study shows that exogenous explanations prevailed in the first descriptions of the Mapudungun language, despite which the syntactic and morphological particularities of this language were manifested.