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

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his caravels and the Taino canoes, if not, why the reflection about that element on a
short letter.
However, concerning the other word, piragua it is imperative to mention that
this word doesn’t appear in any of the Columbus early chronicles. Instead, this word
seems to show up in the chronicles after the discovery of the continental lands and often
accompanied by its association with its Taino homolog, canoa. This seems to indicate a
possible subsequent adoption or linguistic borrowing from a different language, the
Caribs to be precise. As a matter of fact, the first mention of piragua in any of these
texts doesn’t appear until chapter CLIX of de Las Casas’ Historia de las Indias after the
Spanish arrival to a small island of the coast of Venezuela called Cubagua. In his
writings, de Las Casas states:
toman luego una piragua –que es una canoa de otra arte hecha y muy ligera… 97
Amazingly, even de Las Casas uses piragua and canoa in the comparative verb
form. The text translates as follows: “later they took a pirogue which is a type of lighter
canoe made in a different way”. This description has the same comparative
construction used by Diaz del Castillo in the quote cited in page 38 where he states that
“they are canoes made out of artesian wood, very big and crafted with a single
wooden log”. This grammatical use seems to indicate a word integration in the case of
both chronicles as if the language used had already experienced an incorporation
process with some Taino words, in this case, canoe.
The images below are examples of the canoes prior to Bernal Diaz’s text with
their original names. It is important to mention that, except for piragua, the other
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(Las Casas, 1875)