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

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The quote above is from Oviedo’s General and Natural History of the Indies. In
this book, he dedicates a whole chapter to the word mamey and further places this
term in the Taino linguistic and cultural context. However, this quote is of extreme
importance because it illustrates a pre-Columbian middle linguistic region in Central
America, possibly shared by Nahuatl-Arawak groups that used and interchanged words
that belonged to both languages. By describing that the “Indians of Nicaragua called the
term munonsapot”, a word that contains both, the Taino—Arawak and Nahuatl terms,
Oviedo is unknowingly placing both term as synonyms that pre-Columbian people, at
least in this region of Central America, already used interchangeably.
Chapter XXXIII, page 105
[…] fuimos por unas sabanas grandes adonde habían dado guerra a Francisco
de Lugo y a Pedro de Alvarado; y llamábase aquella sabana y pueblo Sintla,
subjeto al mismo Tabasco.
The next word in the sequence of our research is sabana > ‘savannah’. This
word, often used to describe a prairie, a plain or a grassland seems to have had a slightly
different connotation in its Taino phonology and topography. It is possible, that given
the geographical differences between the Caribbean and the mainland, the term was
used by the Taino to denotate a ‘planted extension of land’. For example, if we analyze
the prefix and suffix of this word, which given the Spanish lexicalization, could have
sounded like xÇa > ‘planted’ + bana > ‘extension of land’, the Taino connotation to the
term could refer to an extension of land that was not barren. This is said, because the
prefix is found in the surviving word, Saona e.g. xÇa > ‘planted’ + o > ‘under’ + na >
‘little extension’ = ‘planted little under thicket’. What is remarkable, is that in the