{ "id": "beltran-arte-del-idioma-maya-1746", "type": "entity", "name": "Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas (Mexico, 1746)", "summary": "A Yucatec-born Franciscan wrote a grammar of Maya in 1742 and had it printed at Mexico in 1746. Its last page is a retraction: having called an earlier friar the proto-master of the language, Beltran had since read that someone else wrote the first Maya grammar and someone else again first got one into print, and he says so in print, correcting his own title page before the word FIN.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "new-spain", "yucatan", "language", "books", "printing", "eighteenth-century", "franciscans" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "landa-relacion-de-las-cosas-de-yucatan" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "perez-diccionario-de-la-lengua-maya-1866" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mixtec-printed-philology-1593" } ], "questions": [ "Who wrote the Arte del idioma maya of 1746?", "Who wrote the first grammar of the Maya language?", "Which Maya grammar was the first to be printed?", "What alphabet did eighteenth-century Maya grammars use?", "What were colonial grammars of Yucatec Maya used for?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The volume opened here is not the original. It is the second edition, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas y semilexicon yucateco, printed at Merida de Yucatan by the Imprenta de J. D. Espinosa in 1859, and it opens with a page headed \"Dos palabras del editor\".", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "That editor's note gives the dates of the work. The repeated requests of respectable persons obliged him to reprint the Arte del idioma maya formed by the R. P. F. Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa Maria in the year 1742, he being then master of that language, and ordered printed by Beltran himself at Mexico in 1746.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The same note explains why an 1859 editor thought this the best grammar of its class, and the reason is biographical: the author, besides having the knowledge needed to arrange it, was a son of Yucatan, was raised among the Indians, and after ordination lived many years in the mountains administering the sacraments to them and instructing them in the Catholic religion, which gave him more understanding and facility in the language. This is an editor advocating for the book he is selling, and is reported as such.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The grammar begins by separating orthography from grammar. The Exordio preliminar says that in order not to confuse the grammatical art with the puerile rudiments - which come down to teaching how to characterise the letters, how to pronounce them and how to distinguish them in writing and placing - the author set this exordio apart as a different thing from what is art for grammarians, although it contains notices so necessary that without them one could not enter by the doors of this art.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The alphabet it then prints for Maya is not the Castilian one. It runs a, b, c, the backwards-c character, ch, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, pp, t, th, tz, u, x, y and z, with the doubled and aspirated letters standing for sounds Castilian has no sign for.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The 1859 editor argues with his author in a footnote on the same page, which is a useful demonstration that this reprint is an edited text and not a facsimile. Beltran, he says, writes the struck p doubled, pp, to give it the strong sound, when a single struck p would be enough to distinguish it from the soft unstruck p as in Castilian, and as has been practised until now, writing poc for hat and pul, and not ppoc, ppul.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The book's purpose is legible in what it chooses to end with. The last pages of the semilexicon are a table of the Christian calendar in Maya - Resurreccion as \"U kin Caputcuxtal\", Ascension as \"U kin Nacal ti Caan\", Santisima Trinidad as \"U kin Cilich Oxil\", Natividad de N. Redentor as \"U kin u zihil ca ah Lohil\" - so that the year a Maya parish was to keep could be named in Maya. The achievement and the evangelising purpose are the same object, and the individual Maya forms are given here at reduced confidence because the scan's inner margin is cut and its orthography uses characters the digitisation renders unreliably.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Then, before the word FIN, comes the retraction, and it is the reason this book is worth an entry of its own. Beltran advises the reader that although in this Arte he had styled the R. P. Gabriel de San Buenaventura with the title of proto-master of the Yucatec language, he has since read that the first man to make a Maya grammar was the R. P. F. Luis de Villalpando, the first religious to set foot in Campeche - Father Testera, though he came earlier, got no further than Champoton and made no grammar; that the second, who perfected Villalpando's grammar, was Father Landa, first Provincial of that province and the second bishop to take possession of the see; but that neither of them printed a grammar. Only Fr. Juan Coronel put his to press; and because none of these grammars was to be found, only Father Gabriel's being current, Beltran had given him the title. \"Ahora digo, que ese titulo pertenece al R. P. Villalpando, y en cuanto a primer impresor a el P. Coronel.\"", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Two things follow from that page that are easy to miss. First, an eighteenth-century missionary grammarian treated priority as a question to be settled by reading rather than by assertion, and printed the correction against himself. Second, the man Beltran names as having perfected Villalpando's grammar - first Provincial of that province, second bishop to take possession of the see - is Diego de Landa, whose Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan this corpus treats separately and whose record in Yucatan is not something a grammar's genealogy can be read apart from. Beltran's page establishes the philological descent and nothing else, and neither does this claim.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "What this object rests on, and what it does not. It rests on page scans of the 1859 Merida reprint - the editor's foreword, page 1 of the Exordio preliminar, and the final page 242 - and on nothing else. The reprint is a reset text whose editor annotates and disputes his author's orthography, so it is tiered secondary and no claim here should be read as the 1746 sheets having been inspected; the 1746 title page was not opened, and the dates 1742 and 1746 are the editor's statement, not a reading of the original imprint. The grammar's body, its verb paradigms and the bulk of the semilexicon were not read.", "sources": [ "beltran-arte-idioma-maya-1859" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Yucatec Maya philology reaches English readers through Landa's Relacion and through the nineteenth-century dictionaries; Beltran's Arte of 1746 is normally a line in a bibliography, and the question \"who wrote the first Maya grammar\" is usually answered with a name and no evidence. This object quotes the page where an eighteenth-century Franciscan answers it himself, and answers it against his own earlier text: Villalpando first wrote one, Landa perfected it, neither printed it, Coronel printed his, and the title of proto-master that Beltran had awarded to Gabriel de San Buenaventura is withdrawn in the last paragraph of his own book. It also gives the Maya alphabet the grammar prints, the 1859 editor's footnote disagreeing with Beltran about writing pp for the ejective p - which is what fixes the reprint as an edited text and this object as secondary - and the table of Christian feast days in Maya that the semilexicon ends on, which is the purpose the whole apparatus was built for.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-15", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/beltran-arte-del-idioma-maya-1746", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/beltran-arte-del-idioma-maya-1746.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas (Mexico, 1746)", "description": "A Yucatec-born Franciscan wrote a grammar of Maya in 1742 and had it printed at Mexico in 1746. Its last page is a retraction: having called an earlier friar the proto-master of the language, Beltran had since read that someone else wrote the first Maya grammar and someone else again first got one into print, and he says so in print, correcting his own title page before the word FIN.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/beltran-arte-del-idioma-maya-1746", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-15", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas y semilexicon yucateco, second edition (Merida de Yucatan, 1859)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=mVsmAAAAMAAJ" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas (Mexico, 1746)" } }