El "Compendio de gramática" del Hermano Miguel, fuente de conocimiento del estado de la lengua española en la América Andina a finales del siglo XIX

Resumen

Miguel Febres Cordero, Brother of the Christian Schools, born in Cuenca (Ecuador) in 1854, is the author of a series of texts for the training of students at the La Salle schools founded in some Latin American countries at the end of 19th century. Among these texts the Compendio del tratado teórico-práctico de Gramática de la lengua castellana (1887) is of special interest. This text is addressed to primary school students in Ecuador and the neighboring nations. This manual, which basically continues to be Andrés Bello's grammatical model is of special interest because, together with the grammatical doctrine that should be studied by school children, picks up a large number of frequent linguistic errors in the Spanish-speaking Ecuadorian population, not only in the humble classes of the population but also in the classes of wealthy families, in order to correct those uses that Brother Miguel considers vicious and inappropriate for educated people. The analysis of these incorrect uses of the language can help us to know what must have been the real situation of the language of the speakers of the Northern Andean countries at the end of the 19th century.