Moziño’s Noticias de Nutka: An Analysis of Spanish Documentation of Nuu-chah-nulth Vocabulary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares Spanish documentation of words in the Mowachaht variety of the Nuu-chahnulth language of Vancouver Island, made during the 1792 Expedition of the Limits, to entries in a dictionary compiled by the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council in 1991. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the transcription of Nuu-chah-nulth words by Spanish scientist Jose Mariano Mozino and shed additional light on an occurrence of early contact between the Spanish and the Indigenous peoples of Vancouver Island. A number of Mowachaht words and their sounds are analyzed and possible explanations for differences between the two documents are given. This paper shows that Mozino was able to, in many cases, accuratelydocument words in this unfamiliar language. Instances in which his documentation was inaccurate could, at times, be attributed to key differences in the Nuu-chah-nulth and Spanish languages. Mozino’s choice of orthography when presented with an unfamiliar sound was influenced by the widespread Mexican Indigenous language, Nahuatl. Issues of language documentation are discussed, including perception, transcription, and orthography. Background on the 1792 Expedition of the Limits, Mozino, the Nuu-chah-nulth language, and the Mowachaht people is provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".