The materials gathered in the corpus can be classified into two different groups: on the one hand, there are those manuscripts that Bonaparte commissioned to write and created himself and, on the other hand, there are also the already existing documents that he was gifted.
The first group, which has a larger number of manuscripts, is composed by those texts translated into the varieties L.L. Bonaparte indicated to his collaborators, following thus, the translation procedure applied in the XIX century. Those translated texts were Christian Doctrine and different books and passages taken from the Old and New Testaments.
Many of the authors were well-known writers, and even very significant in Basque literature.
The manuscripts L.L. Bonaparte obtained as presents include different authors, dialects and typology. Many of the authors were well-known writers, and even very significant in Basque literature, such as Mª de Azkue, Juan Antonio Moguel, Jean MartÃn Iribarren, Jean Baptiste Dasconaguerre or Joaquin Lizarraga. Other manuscripts such as the splendid Sermons from Oñati and Baztan have been anonymously written, however, the language represents an invaluable richness.
Text typology is also diverse since there are documents written both in verse and prose. Variety in literary genre can also be appreciated: doctrinal, pedagogical, social, recreational and also epistolary. The vast majority of the documents are, as mentioned above, religious and most of them are translated fragments from The Catechism (70 versions) and the Gospel of Matthew (17 versions); however, the corpus becomes even more interesting since one can make a deep study of the Basque dialects by collating different texts.
Finally, different speech registers can be appreciated. In some cases elegant and formal language has been used, whereas in some others, the spontaneous and casual speech can be appreciated but all of them show features of local speech. |
