{ "id": "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800", "type": "entity", "name": "Hervás, Catálogo de las lenguas — Volume I, American languages (Madrid, 1800)", "summary": "The first volume of Lorenzo Hervás's catalogue of the world's languages, printed at Madrid in 1800 and given entirely to the Americas. Hervás classified languages by their grammatical structure rather than their word-lists, grouped maya, cakchi, poconchi, cakchiquil and pocoman into one family with maya proposed as its parent, and named the Q'eqchi' speaker he owed that grouping to. The same volume records languages already extinct and admits how much is missing.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "language", "americas", "books", "indigenous-peoples", "indigenous-knowledge", "ethnography", "eighteenth-century", "enlightenment", "exile", "science", "firsts" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "montoya-tesoro-lengua-guarani-1639" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quechua-printed-lexicography-1560-1754" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "clavijero-disertaciones-1780" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "juan-ignacio-molina-history-of-chili" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "gumilla-orinoco-ilustrado-1745" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "spanish-language" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mixtec-printed-philology-1593" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "lugo-gramatica-mosca-1619" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "obras-perdidas-de-lenguas-indigenas-de-america" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "perez-de-ribas-historia-de-los-triumphos-1645" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "venegas-noticia-de-la-california-1757" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "neve-y-molina-reglas-del-idioma-othomi-1767" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "timucua-printed-philology-1612-1627" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "orozco-y-berra-geografia-de-las-lenguas-1864" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "flores-arte-cakchiquel-1753" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "caramuel-mathesis-biceps-1670" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "arte-de-la-lengua-cahita-1737" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "noceda-sanlucar-vocabulario-tagala-1754" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "zambrano-bonilla-arte-de-lengua-totonaca-1752" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "matlatzinca-pirinda-missionary-philology" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "machoni-arte-lengua-lule-1732" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "marban-arte-lengua-moxa-1701" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quintana-arte-lengua-mixe-1729" } ], "questions": [ "Who first classified the languages of the Americas into families?", "What was Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro's method for grouping languages?", "When was the Mayan language family first identified?", "Who was Domingo Tot Baraona?", "How did the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 affect the study of American languages?", "Did eighteenth-century language classification use grammar or vocabulary?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The volume is a Madrid imprint of 1800. Its title page reads \"Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeracion, division, y clases de estas\", names its author as \"el abate don Lorenzo Hervás\", theologian to Cardinal Juan Francisco Albani, and carries the volume statement \"Volúmen I. Lenguas y naciones americanas\". It was printed with licence at the press of the Administracion del Real Arbitrio de Beneficencia and sold at the Librería de Ranz in the calle de la Cruz. The Americas come first in a catalogue of the whole world.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.95 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The method is stated as a method, and it is grammatical rather than lexical. At article III, number X, Hervás writes that the means he has had in view for distinguishing and classifying the nations named in the work — \"casi todas las conocidas en el mundo\" — consist principally in the observation of the words of their languages \"y principalmente del artificio gramatical de ellas\", and that this artifice \"ha sido en mi observacion el principal medio de que me he valido para conocer la afinidad ó diferencia de las lenguas conocidas, y reducirlas á determinadas clases\". The margin carries the rule in one line: \"El artificio gramatical de las lenguas es claro distintivo de las naciones.\"", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "He gives a reason for preferring grammar to vocabulary. The particular arrangement by which each language orders its words, he argues, \"no depende de la invencion humana, y ménos del capricho\", but belongs to the language and forms its ground; nations that leave barbarism and cultivate the sciences become more or less civil and learned, \"mas nunca mudan el fondo del artificio gramatical de sus respectivas lenguas\". Words travel between neighbours and are borrowed; structure, on his account, does not.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The evidential base is stated with numbers. Hervás writes that after taking the greatest care to hear and be informed of the opinion of learned and practical missionaries, he had himself collated \"los elementos gramaticales que he recogido, y formado de diez y nueve lenguas americanas, y los vocabularios de mas de treinta lenguas\", and had found the missionaries' judgement on the character of those languages almost always true. Nineteen grammatical sketches and more than thirty word-lists is the whole footing of the American volume.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Indigenous testimony is admitted as evidence, and identified as such. The missionaries, Hervás writes, speak of some languages from practical knowledge and reason about others \"fundándose en las noticias que de ellos les han dado los indios americanos, las quales comunmente han hallado ser verdaderas\". He then records the native category he is relying on: \"Estos indios llaman parientas á todas las naciones que hablan dialectos de una misma lengua matriz\", and the missionaries know by experience that the Indians very rarely err when they say \"Tal y tal nacion no son nuestras parientas\". The relation of kinship between languages reaches the printed catalogue from the speakers' own account of it.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The volume sets out a Mayan family and names the informant it came from. Hervás writes that he owes the discovery of the affinity of these languages to what he learned of cakchi \"por medio de un indio cakchi, llamado Domingo Tot Baraona, criado del R. P. Miguel Zaragoza\", the Dominican procurator of the province of Guatemala, who had come to Rome; that Tot at sixteen knew his own language perfectly, Spanish, and no little pocomana; that on comparison the numerals, many other words and \"no poco del artificio gramatical\" resembled maya; and that the group is therefore \"maya, cakchi, poconchi, cakchiquil y pocoman\", with the parenthesis \"quizá la maya sea la matriz\".", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The same passage shows the method overreaching. From the comparison Hervás infers that the Yucatecan nation had anciently extended through the principal provinces from Yucatan to the isthmus of Panama — a conclusion drawn from one informant, one word-list and a partial grammatical impression. He marks it as an inference and hedges the parent language with \"quizá\", but the extension itself is stated flatly. A method good enough to find a real family is not by itself good enough to fix its extent, and this page prints both results side by side.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The catalogue exists because of a royal expulsion and is damaged by it. Hervás compiled in Italy from Jesuits expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767, and prints a correspondent's letter recording what that cost: of the Sonora languages he can give no distinct notice because he did not see those missionaries in America and they \"no han venido á Italia, habiendo sido detenidos todos en España\"; on Maya nothing can be added beyond what came from Don Xavier Gomez, then eighty-three and unable to answer fully, and from Don Domingo Rodriguez, who reached Italy knowing Maya as well as he knew Spanish; and for the rest no individual answer is possible, the stated reason being that \"ya casi no se hallan misioneros que entiendan el Padre Nuestro en dichas lenguas\". Hervás adds in his own voice that in the catalogue formed from what missionaries gave him by word of mouth \"faltan muchísimos\".", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "He states the limits of his own evidence without being asked. He concedes that transmigration, the roughness of nations and the variety of their pronunciations conspire to disfigure languages, so that not a few that at first appear and are even judged very diverse will prove to have affinity; that he has not placed in the class of parent languages every tongue the missionaries called distinct, for want of documents to confirm the distinction; and that some of the missionaries he consulted may have been mistaken in taking for different languages those that are not.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The book records extinction as well as classification. Of Baja California it says that plagues and misfortunes \"han casi extinguido la nacion Pericú\", which at the start of the century numbered three thousand souls and by the time of the expulsion perhaps three hundred, and those spoke Spanish, so that \"la lengua pericú se debe contar ya entre las extinguidas\"; the margin reads \"La lengua pericú ha perecido\". The Loreto dialect had gone the same way, all there now speaking Spanish, so that it could no longer be established whether it had been a dialect or a parent language. The catalogue of the languages of the Americas is also, in places, their death certificate.", "sources": [ "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-madrid-1800" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [ "Hervás classified languages by grammatical structure rather than shared vocabulary, and said so as an explicit rule of method in 1800.", "The American volume rests on grammatical sketches of nineteen languages and word-lists of more than thirty, all gathered from missionaries expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767.", "It groups maya, cakchi, poconchi, cakchiquil and pocoman as one family and proposes maya as the parent — a Mayan family in print, hedged with \"quizá\".", "The grouping is credited by name to a sixteen-year-old Q'eqchi' speaker, Domingo Tot Baraona, brought to Rome as a servant: an indigenous informant named in the text rather than absorbed into it.", "The same volume records the Pericú language as already extinct and its speakers reduced from three thousand to three hundred, and admits that very many languages are missing from the catalogue altogether." ], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of the birth of comparative linguistics normally start in the 1810s with Rask, Bopp and Grimm, and mention Hervás, if at all, as a collector of Lord's Prayers. What is missing is the evidence that decides the question: the page where he states that grammatical structure rather than vocabulary is his criterion of affinity and gives his reason for it, the page where he counts his material — nineteen grammars, thirty-odd vocabularies — the page where a Mayan family is set out and credited by name to a Q'eqchi' teenager in Rome, and the pages where the same book overreaches to Panama, admits that very many languages are missing, and records the Pericú as extinct. Those pages are transcribed here from the Madrid 1800 sheets, so the claim of priority and the limits on it stand on the same document.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-11", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Hervás, Catálogo de las lenguas — Volume I, American languages (Madrid, 1800)", "description": "The first volume of Lorenzo Hervás's catalogue of the world's languages, printed at Madrid in 1800 and given entirely to the Americas. Hervás classified languages by their grammatical structure rather than their word-lists, grouped maya, cakchi, poconchi, cakchiquil and pocoman into one family with maya proposed as its parent, and named the Q'eqchi' speaker he owed that grouping to. The same volume records languages already extinct and admits how much is missing.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-11", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeracion, division, y clases de estas por la diversidad de sus idiomas y dialectos. Volúmen I. Lenguas y naciones americanas", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=yJkFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR1" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Hervás, Catálogo de las lenguas — Volume I, American languages (Madrid, 1800)" } }