The category of preposición in early missionary grammars of Aymara (Bertonio 1603 and Torres Rubio 1616): Between inflection and suffixation

Edoardo Nardi
Università degli Studi di Palermo | Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi

In this contribution, I investigate the conceptual and terminological relation between ‘prepositions’ (preposiciones) and a set of suffixes, mainly case markers, in Bertonio’s (1603) and Torres Rubio’s (1616) Aymara grammars. These morphemes are classified as prepositions or inflectional markers, or even both at the same time. This overlap is motivated by the typological differences between the language described, Aymara, and the metalanguage, Latin, since the former does not feature a full equivalent to Latin prepositions and encodes most grammatical relations by suffixation. The analysis reveals that the distinction between prepositions and case markers is established on functional grounds and based on the comparison with Latin categories.

Publication history

Date received: 11 March 2026

Date accepted: 24 June 2026

Published online: 9 July 2026

Table of contents

During the colonial period, many missionaries undertook the endeavor of describing extra-European languages, by giving birth to what we call today ‘missionary linguistics’. In the last decades, scholars have become more and more aware of the importance of this subfield for language studies (Zwartjes 2012), resulting in a growing interest by linguists with various specializations: the contribution of missionary linguistics, in fact, spans across several fields of study, including not only the history of linguistics and grammaticography, but also language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics (see Bossong 2009, Case 2020, among others).

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