{
  "id": "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Ildefonso Joseph Flores's Arte de la lengua cakchiquel (Guatemala, 1753)",
  "summary": "The first grammar of a Mayan language of Guatemala to reach a printing press, made in Guatemala City in 1753 by a Franciscan parish priest. Its title promises not one language but a parallel of three — Kiche, Cakchiquel and Çutuhil — and its own approbations print the complaint that answers the obvious question: two centuries of friars had written grammars of these languages and not one of them had ever been printed.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "language",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "guatemala",
    "education",
    "translation",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ximenez-historias-del-origen-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "perez-diccionario-de-la-lengua-maya-1866"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "carochi-arte-de-la-lengua-mexicana-1645"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mixtec-printed-philology-1593"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "first-printing-press-americas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "remesal-historia-de-chiapa-y-guatemala"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the first printed grammar of Cakchiquel?",
    "Who was Ildefonso Joseph Flores?",
    "Which Mayan languages does the 1753 Arte compare?",
    "Why were no grammars of the Guatemalan Mayan languages printed before 1753?",
    "Where was Flores's Arte de la lengua cakchiquel printed?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page reads \"ARTE DE LA LENGVA METROPOLITANA DEL REYNO CAKCHIQUEL, O GVATEMALICO, CON UN PARALLELO DE LAS Lenguas Metropolitanas de los Reynos Kiche, Cakchiquel, y Çutuhil, que hoy integran EL REYNO DE GUATEMALA\", composed by \"el P. F. Ildefonso Ioseph Flores, hijo de la Santa Provincia del Dulcissimo Nombre de IESVS de Guatemala, de la Regular Observancia de N. Seraphico P. S. Francisco, Ex-Lector de Phylosophia, Predicador, y Cura Doctrinero por el Rl. Patronato del Pueblo de Santa Maria de IESVS\", and the imprint \"En Guatemala con licencia de los Sup. por Sebastian de Arebalo: Año de 1753\". The book was made in Guatemala, by a working parish priest, on a Guatemalan press.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The book is a comparative grammar, not a grammar of one language. Its own rules are stated contrastively across the three: at printed page 207, opening the section on the anomalous verb Ah — the \"Volo, vis de esta Lengua\" — Flores writes that every monosyllabic active verb \"en esta Lengua Cakchiquel, aunque la oracion acabe en el, no añade O, en las quatro primeras vocales, ni V en la quinta como el Kiche, y Çutuhil\", and that only this one verb adds O when the period ends in it. The example he gives is a sentence a priest would actually need: \"tava ho pe cat4ule? Quieres casarte?\"",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The claim that this was the first such grammar to be printed is made inside the book itself, by one of its own censors, and made as a reproach. On the closing leaves of an approbation he writes: \"Ha docientos, y nueve años que se enarbolaron los estandartes Catholicos en estas partes de Guatemala, y en tan dilatado espacio, no hemos visto en la luz publica vn Arte de estas Lenguas. Pues que es esto? donde están los Betanzos? donde los Escalonas? donde los Maldonados? donde están tantos, y tan eminentes Idiomistas, que se han admirado en la Seraphica Provincia? es possible que hombres tan provectos en las lenguas, no estampassen vn Arte de ellas?\"",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The censor's own dating of the conquest of Guatemala is his and not this object's: two hundred and nine years before 1753 gives 1544, a date later than the campaigns of the 1520s that other sources place at the beginning of Spanish rule in Guatemala. It is recorded here as the figure the book prints, not as a chronology to be relied on.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "What had not been printed had nonetheless been written, and the prologue names the tradition in three generations. In the first century, \"los Ordoñes, los Betanzos, los Zalcedos, los Porras, los Alvaros de Paz, los Juanes Lazaros, los Avilas\" and the bishop of Chile Fray Juan de Espinosa; in the second, \"los Anleos, los Mendozas, los Zaffez, los Cardenas, los Valeras, los Cotos, los Davalos, y sobre todos el R. P. Fr. Francisco Maldonado\"; and in the eighteenth century \"los Rodrigues, los Cordovas, los Castros, Pantaleon de Guzman, los Quiñones, y ultimamente los Yriondos, y los Vtrillas\". They wrote, Flores says, \"variedad de Artes, Diccionarios, y Bocabularios\", useful \"no solo en lo perteneciente a la Christiandad, sino tambien en lo moral, politico, y natural\" — a philological literature of three centuries that stayed in manuscript.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The book's purpose was administrative and evangelical, and the front matter says so without embarrassment: the same prologue calls the languages \"estos barbaros Idiomas\" while praising the men who spent their lives on them, and the approbation of Fray Gregorio Azañón commends the Arte because ministers \"siendo de otro Idioma, respecto de sus oyentes, puedan facilmente con su Predicacion, levantar vn Edificio espiritual\". The achievement and the hierarchy it served are printed on the same leaves.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The approbations are by interested parties and one of them says so. A censor writes that he ought to have asked to be excused, \"por ser yo su Maestro, y el primero, que le puse en las manos el Arte de estos Idiomas\", and that on reading the book he passed \"de Maestro ... à Discipulo, aprendiendo, y admirando en aqueste primoroso Arte, lo que hasta ahora con tantos años de exercicio, y enseñanza de las lenguas, ni avia visto, ni sabido\". The praise in this volume is the praise of the author's own teacher and of his own religious province, and the claims here about the book's quality are weighted accordingly.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Printing was not the beginning of Christian text in the language. At printed page 229 Flores argues a point of doctrinal vocabulary against \"el Cathecismo impresso de esta Lengua\", so a catechism in Cakchiquel was already in print and in use before his grammar was. The grammar was the first Arte to be printed, which is a narrower claim than the first printed book in the language.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The approbation of Fray Gregorio Azañón — synodal examiner of the archbishopric and prior of the Dominican convent of Guatemala — is dated \"En este Convento de N. P. Santo Domingo de Guatemala, en 27. de Marzo de este año de 1753\", so the Franciscan's grammar was licensed through a Dominican censor within the same year as its imprint.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The copy digitised is the Zentralbibliothek Zürich's, whose bookplate on the second leaf records it as the 1923 gift of Professor Stoll, and its title leaf has lost its upper outer corner, taking the first letters of the first four lines of the title with it. The full title is recovered from Azañón's approbation, which transcribes it, and from the volume's catalogue entry.",
      "sources": [
        "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Reference coverage of Flores in English is a bibliographic line — name, language, year — usually copied from a nineteenth-century catalogue, and it does not say what is in the book. This object quotes the 1753 sheets: the title's promise of a three-way parallel, a worked contrast between Cakchiquel on one side and Kiche and Çutuhil on the other at printed page 207, and the censor's own reproach that in two centuries nobody had printed an Arte of these languages, with the roll of Betanzos, Escalona and Maldonado he calls to answer for it. It sets the cost beside the achievement from the same front matter — the languages called \"barbaros Idiomas\" on the page that honours the men who studied them, a purpose stated as easier preaching, and an approbation written by the author's own teacher who admits he should have recused himself. And it holds the priority claim to what the sheets support: the first printed Arte, not the first printed book, since the grammar itself argues against a catechism already in print.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-14",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Ildefonso Joseph Flores's Arte de la lengua cakchiquel (Guatemala, 1753)",
    "description": "The first grammar of a Mayan language of Guatemala to reach a printing press, made in Guatemala City in 1753 by a Franciscan parish priest. Its title promises not one language but a parallel of three — Kiche, Cakchiquel and Çutuhil — and its own approbations print the complaint that answers the obvious question: two centuries of friars had written grammars of these languages and not one of them had ever been printed.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-14",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Arte de la lengua metropolitana del reyno Cakchiquel, o Guatemalico, con un parallelo de las lenguas metropolitanas de los reynos Kiche, Cakchiquel, y Çutuhil, que hoy integran el reyno de Guatemala (Guatemala: Sebastian de Arebalo, 1753)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=-uxMwIhP5vYC&pg=PP5"
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Ildefonso Joseph Flores's Arte de la lengua cakchiquel (Guatemala, 1753)"
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}