Oral tradition as a source for studying Guanche
The study of Guanche, the term Maximiano Trapero uses for the language of the ancient Canarians, draws on written evidence and elements preserved through oral tradition. In the introduction to Estudios sobre el guanche (2007), he focuses on surviving vocabulary and proposes two principles: oral tradition as a primary source of documentation and a reassessment of place names (pp. 19–20).[1]
A lost language and surviving vocabulary
Trapero notes that written evidence mainly records isolated lexical items and only rarely sequences longer than a word. He suggests that the language may have disappeared within two or three generations after the conquest of each island. This should be read as his estimate, rather than an established chronology of its disappearance (p. 20).[1]
The survival of words and place names does not mean that the language continued as a system of communication. Trapero himself warns that orally transmitted elements have been adapted to Spanish and must be studied in that context. Written records also underwent this adaptation (p. 21).[1]
Transmission, writing and fieldwork
According to Trapero, Guanche studies have relied heavily on historical sources from the conquest and colonisation. He criticises the repetition of earlier word lists without sufficient checks and calls for fieldwork on living speech. His preference for oral tradition is a methodological position: writing adds the graphic representation of a sound sequence to the adaptation between languages (pp. 20–21).[1]
Eladio Santana Martel’s foreword explains another difficulty: old spellings followed variable conventions and cannot automatically be read using today’s sound values. It is Santana Martel who illustrates Trapero’s proposal with Guarazoca, in El Hierro, and the oral form Guarasoca. He compares it with written variants to argue for attention to local pronunciation when spelling is uncertain; this does not demonstrate that pre-Hispanic pronunciation has survived unchanged (pp. 17–18).[1]
Juan Bethencourt Alfonso and oral tradition
Trapero acknowledges that oral tradition was not entirely absent from earlier research. He highlights Juan Bethencourt Alfonso, who collected oral material in the last third of the nineteenth century, chiefly in southeastern Tenerife. These were accounts of surviving elements, rather than interviews with speakers of a still-living Guanche language (pp. 21–22).[1]
What this source can reveal
Listening to and documenting speech in the islands makes it possible to study the surviving vocabulary and place names that interest Trapero. His proposal calls for taking oral tradition seriously and critically reviewing written records, while distinguishing elements incorporated into Spanish from the ancient language they came from (pp. 19–22).[1]