Language of the Voiceless: Traces of Taino Language, Food, and Culture in the Americas From 1492 to the Present

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caminar, por causa que se nos hincaban por las plantas de los pies aquellas
puntas y piedra de los cerobucos, con mucho trabajo nos metimos en un monte,
y con otras piedras que había en el monte cortamos cortezas de árboles que
pusimos por suelas, atadas a los pies con unas que parecen cuerdas delgadas
que llaman bejucos,
The next Taino word in the sequence of BDC’s text is bejuco or bohuco >
‘vine 146 ’. However, let us take a slightly different approach concerning the analysis of its
etymology. Rather than establishing its Taino origin from other interrelated languages,
we are going to, first, use a Taino dictionary as reference, and second, the term is going
to be analyzed from other Taino lexical structures studied in this research thus far, to try
to understand its meaning. This is done, because Taino is often analyzed from its
etymon relation to surviving languages at times taking for granted that Taino was an
independent language different from its genetically common ancestors, the same way
Spanish is different from Portuguese, French, Italian and Latin. This Taino comparative
method was used at the beginning of this study to illustrate the vitality of the language,
and then mixed with the language family correlation when a particular term needed to
be established in the pre-mainland context. This second correlation was employed due
to the overlexicalization and phonetic parallels between terms from the Nahuatl and
Mayan languages with Taino in order to separate the terms.
146
(García Bidó, 2010)