{
  "id": "hernando-de-ribas",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hernando de Ribas, Nahua translator of Tetzcuco (d. 1597)",
  "summary": "A Nahua from Tetzcuco, among the first pupils of the college at Tlatelolco, who translated Latin and Spanish into Nahuatl for sense rather than word by word, and who is named in print as the man with whose help Alonso de Molina composed the Nahuatl grammar and dictionary still used today, and Juan de Gaona the Dialogos de la paz. Neither title page carries his name. The attribution survives in one Franciscan's prologue of 1606, nine years after his death.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "language",
    "translation",
    "books",
    "new-spain",
    "biography",
    "mexico",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "americas"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juan-bautista-prologo-del-sermonario-1606"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "agustin-de-la-fuente"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "olmos-arte-lengua-mexicana-1547"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "fernando-de-alva-ixtlilxochitl"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Hernando de Ribas?",
    "Who helped Alonso de Molina write his Nahuatl dictionary?",
    "Did Nahua scholars co-author the Nahuatl books printed in Mexico?",
    "What happened to the first pupils of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "He is named in the prologue to the Sermonario en lengua mexicana of Fr. Juan Bautista, printed at Mexico by Diego Lopez Davalos in 1606, first among \"algunos naturales muy ladinos y habiles\" who had helped make the author's books. The prologue places him as \"de los primeros hijos del Colegio Real de Santa Cruz, que esta fundado en el Convento de Santiago Tlatilulco en Mexico\" and as a native of the city of Tetzcuco.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "His skill is described as a translator's rather than a grammarian's: \"muy gran latino, y que con mucha facilidad traducia cualquiera cosa de latin y de romance en la lengua mexicana, atendiendo mas al sentido que a la letra\" - attending more to the sense than to the letter. The same passage says he wrote and translated for the author, on various matters, \"mas de treinta manos de papel\", more than thirty quires.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The claim that carries the weight is a claim about other men's books: \"Con su ayuda compuso el P. Fr. Alonso de Molina el Arte y Vocabulario mexicano, y el P. Fr. Juan de Gaona los Dialogos de la paz y tranquilidad del alma\". With his help Molina composed the Nahuatl grammar and dictionary, and Gaona the Dialogues on the peace and tranquillity of the soul. The same sentence continues into the author's own works: with Ribas's help he composed the Vocabulario Eclesiastico and a great part of the Vanidades del Mundo of Estella, the Flos Sanctorum, the Exposicion del Decalogo \"y otros muchos tratados y libros\".",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The attribution rests on a single witness and should be held at that strength. It appears in a prologue written nine years after Ribas's death by a friar with an interest in accounting for the help he had received, in a book published under his own name; and the printed title pages of the works concerned name Molina and Gaona alone. No independent notice of Ribas was reachable for this object: the bibliographer who reprinted the prologue in 1886 gives him no entry of his own, and a search of his volume and of Beristain's Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional for the name returned nothing.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta",
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886",
        "beristain-biblioteca-hispanoamericana-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The chronology the claim requires is at least consistent. The Colegio de Santa Cruz was founded in 1536 and Ribas is placed among its first pupils; Fr. Juan de Gaona, who had studied theology at Paris and taught at Valladolid before crossing to New Spain in 1538, gave ten years wholly to the Nahuatl language and died on 27 September 1560, so any help Ribas gave him falls before that date and in his own youth. Nothing of Gaona's was printed in his lifetime; the Coloquios or Dialogos appeared at Mexico in 1582, twenty-two years after he died.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Gaona's competence in Nahuatl is reported in the same volume in terms that make the collaboration legible rather than surprising: he possessed the language \"mejor que cualquier otro de sus contemporaneos, segun lo declaran ellos mismos\", and he taught grammar, rhetoric and philosophy to the Indians of the college of Tlatelolco. A friar who taught rhetoric to Nahua students, in a college whose pupils are elsewhere recorded as helping to set the type of books printed in their language, is a friar in a position to be helped by them.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The prologue gives his death precisely and his character in the terms of the order that trained him: he died \"el ano de noventa y siete, a once de Septiembre\", and the friar writing adds that he holds Our Lord paid him for his faithful labours, \"porque era indio muy buen cristiano, muy aficionado a las cosas de nuestra santa fe catolica y a ensenar a los religiosos la lengua mexicana\". The praise is a mission's praise, and it is also the record that a Nahua man spent his working life teaching Spanish friars his own language.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What this object does not establish: the year of his birth, his family, whether he held office in his own town, what he was paid or whether he was paid, what share of Molina's Arte or Vocabulario is his, and whether any manuscript in his hand survives. The thirty quires the prologue credits him with are not identified with any surviving text. Those questions are left to archives not reachable for this entry.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-bautista-prologo-sermonario-1606-icazbalceta"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario is the most consulted Nahuatl dictionary ever printed and English-language accounts of it name one author. The single sixteenth-century sentence that says otherwise - that Molina composed the Arte and the Vocabulario, and Gaona the Dialogos, with the help of a named Nahua from Tetzcuco who translated for sense and died in 1597 - is quoted in specialist Nahuatl philology and almost nowhere else. This object gives that sentence in the words in which it survives, with the man's training, birthplace, working method and death date, and then does what an advocacy piece would not: states that the claim has exactly one witness, that the witness is interested, that the title pages contradict it by silence, and that a search of the two standard Mexican bibliographies for his name returns nothing - while showing that the dates the claim needs do hold.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-16",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hernando-de-ribas",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/hernando-de-ribas.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Hernando de Ribas, Nahua translator of Tetzcuco (d. 1597)",
    "description": "A Nahua from Tetzcuco, among the first pupils of the college at Tlatelolco, who translated Latin and Spanish into Nahuatl for sense rather than word by word, and who is named in print as the man with whose help Alonso de Molina composed the Nahuatl grammar and dictionary still used today, and Juan de Gaona the Dialogos de la paz. Neither title page carries his name. The attribution survives in one Franciscan's prologue of 1606, nine years after his death.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hernando-de-ribas",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-16",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI. Primera parte. Catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 á 1600, con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones, precedido de una noticia acerca de la introducción de la imprenta en México",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=cr0TAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA64"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional, tomo I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=zf1Zmuyz58UC&pg=PA271"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Prologo del Sermonario en lengua mexicana de Fr. Juan Bautista (Mexico, Diego Lopez Davalos, 1606), reprinted entire in Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, Bibliografia mexicana del siglo XVI, pp. 360-363",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=cr0TAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA360"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Hernando de Ribas, Nahua translator of Tetzcuco (d. 1597)"
  }
}