| One of the most pernicious historical questions in the field of Spanish-American history involves the sixteenth century conquest of millions of Americans by only a few thousand Europeans. In the few instances in which a full explanation is advanced in publications on the subject, historians typically postulate a vaguely-defined combination of political, religious, technological, bacteriological, tactical, cosmological, and psychological causes for such an extraordinary feat. Ultimately, however, such polycausal explanations tend to overlook the one over-arching advantage that made the Spanish military conquest of America possible: first-contact translation. The task of communicating with the inhabitants of America was particularly daunting considering that the Spaniards encountered over five hundred mutually unintelligible languages as they explored the rain forests, canyons, snowcaps, and valleys of America. Yet Spaniards admirably overcame the obstacle of language. Significantly, linguistic access, which was usually available even at virgin first-contact, allowed the Spaniards to parlay their meager technological, tactical, and other advantages into the full military conquest of the millions of inhabitants of Spanish America.;Spanish conquistadors from 1492 until 1542 secured such linguistic access at first contact by means of a translator acquisition procedure which they engineered, implemented, and perfected over the decades of conquest. An analysis of a variety of contemporaneous records of seventy-six of the most significant first-contact Spanish expeditions reveals that this language acquisition procedure was ongoing and universally implemented in some form. The primary strategies that resulted in ultimate military conquest—strategies such as factionalization, cosmology appropriation, feigning of divinity, ambush avoidance, feudal insinuation, and reprovisioning—were completely reliant on the availability of fluid intercultural communication in the formative earliest period of inter-cultural contact. Without the translation acquisition procedure, such strategies simply would not have been effective, and without such strategies, the natives would have effectively repelled Spanish conquest. First-contact interpreters and the translation acquisition strategy that they anchored effected the linguistic conquest of Spanish America. Although it has gone unrecognized by historians, it was only from this linguistic foundation that the military conquest of Spanish America became possible. |
