{
  "id": "machoni-arte-lengua-lule-1732",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Antonio Machoni, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua lule y tonocoté (Madrid, 1732)",
  "summary": "The only printed grammar and dictionary of Lule and Tonocoté, two Chaco languages that no longer have speakers. A Sardinian Jesuit working on the Tucumán frontier put the languages into rules and got them through a Madrid press in 1732 — a hundred years after an earlier grammar of the same speech was written and lost for want of a printer. The same preliminaries record why the Lules were exempted from encomienda, what they owed instead, and the epidemic that met the mission on arrival.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "language",
    "books",
    "translation",
    "printing",
    "ethnography",
    "river-plate",
    "chaco",
    "jesuits",
    "firsts"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "olmos-arte-lengua-mexicana-1547"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "montoya-tesoro-lengua-guarani-1639"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "encomienda"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "epidemic-records-of-spanish-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "marban-arte-lengua-moxa-1701"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quintana-arte-lengua-mixe-1729"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Lule language and who wrote down its grammar?",
    "Who was Antonio Machoni?",
    "Why were the Lules of the Chaco not placed in encomienda?",
    "What happened to Alonso de Bárcena's grammar of Tonocoté?",
    "What did Jesuit grammars of South American languages actually record?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The book was printed at Madrid in 1732. Its title page reads \"ARTE, Y VOCABULARIO DE LA LENGUA LULE, Y TONOCOTE, COMPVESTOS Con Facultad de sus Superiores. POR EL PADRE ANTONIO Machoni de Cerdeña, de la Compañia de Jesvs. CON LICENCIA. En MADRID: Por los Herederos de Juan Garcia Infanzon. Año de 1732.\" The head of the text itself, on the first numbered page, reverses the two languages: \"ARTE DE LA LENGUA TONOCOTÉ, Y LULE.\"",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Machoni's first note states the reach of the language: \"Es esta Lengua propria, y nativa de cinco Naciones muy numerosas, que son Tonocoté, Lule, Yxistiné, Toquistiné, y Oristiné; sola la primera tiene oy mas de cinquenta mil almas, y todas Infieles, que viven en lo interior del Chaco sobre las riberas del rio Pilcomayo.\" The fifty-thousand figure is his own estimate for the Tonocoté alone, made from a mission station and not from a count, and is stated here as what the printed book claims rather than as a demographic fact.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The same note records the language taking Spanish loanwords for what mission life had introduced: \"Faltanle à este Idioma muchas vozes proprias, y necessarias, las quales se suplen de otras Lenguas: V.g. Iglesia: rezar; haziendolas de Castellanas\" — that is, the vocabulary of the church came in from Castilian because the language had no words for it.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The preliminaries date the contact. These peoples \"estuvieron incognitos mas de cien años, sin que se supiesse de ellos; hasta el año de mil setecientos y diez\", when Esteban de Urízar, governor of the province of Tucumán, made his first general entrada into the Chaco; they then came out \"voluntariamente de sus inhabitables Bosques à buscar el remedio de sus almas, y cuerpos\", were assigned first the site of Valbuena and then, as more convenient, Miraflores, where a reducción or pueblo was built for them and they were provided with maintenance, clothing and doctrineros.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "What they were spared, and what they paid instead, is on the same two pages. Because they had come out voluntarily and had never done harm to the Spaniard, the governor judged it conformable to justice and reason not to place them in encomienda — the hatred they bore even to the name of encomendero having, in Machoni's phrase, \"imprimió caracter indeleble en sus corazones\" — and put them \"en la Real Corona, siendo Vassallos de su Magestad\". The exemption was not free: they served \"solo como Soldados auxiliares, y presidiarios de la Frontera de Salta, en la Guerra, que el Español tiene contra los Barbaros del Chaco\", whenever the governor of Tucumán ordered them out, \"con que quedaron exemptos de la mita, y servicio personal à los Españoles.\"",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Machoni states the cost of arriving without a grammar, from his own experience. At the beginning of a mission some contagious sickness may break out among the people, \"con que perecen sin remedio muchos adultos, por no aver modo de instruirles en los Mysterios de nuestra Santa Fè, para administrarles el Sacramento del Santo Bautismo: como me sucedió recien entrado en esta Mission\". His measure of the loss is a sacramental one — adults dying unbaptised for want of a shared language — and it is recorded here as such, but it is also a plain notice that an epidemic met the mission at its outset.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "His book was not the first attempt, and he says so. The harm \"se huviera en mucha parte evitado, si huviera tenido el Arte, y Vocabulario del idioma de estos Indios, que ha mas de cien años compuso el V. P. Alonso de Barzena, quando Evangelizò à los Tonocotès, y Lules\" — a work of which, \"por no averse impresso, no ha quedado mas, que la noticia que de èl se dà en la vida de este Missionero Apostolico\". Bárcena had taken up the labour at sixty-five. The 1732 imprint survives because it reached a press; the earlier grammar did not, and is known only at second hand.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Machoni names his own motive without decoration: \"El principal, y primer motivo, que tuve en reducir à preceptos, y reglas esta lengua, fue la mayor gloria de Dios, y la salvacion de las almas\". He adds a working judgement about the language that cuts against the era's usual condescension — its \"artificio, y preceptos\" are so clear and easy \"que qualquiera, con mediana aplicacion, en breve tiempo los puede comprehender, y hazerse capaz de ellos, y hablar corrientemente, y con expedicion dicho idioma\" — and locates the Tonocoté on the banks of the Yabibiry, between the Río Verde and the Pilcomayo, all three of which run into the Río Paraguay.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The book's own frame is a mission frame and the object does not soften it. The same preliminaries speak of reducing \"las Naciones Barbaras\" to the Church \"con sola la Cruz de Christo, y Predicacion Evangelica\", and of the Chaco peoples as \"todas Infieles\". The grammar was made to convert its speakers, not to preserve their language for its own sake; that it is now the principal surviving record of that language is a consequence its author did not intend and could not have foreseen.",
      "sources": [
        "machoni-arte-lule-tonocote-1732"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of Lule and Tonocoté is a line in a language-death list, sourced to catalogues that no one has opened; the 1732 Madrid imprint is cited constantly and quoted almost never. It is opened here, page by page, and what it yields is not a bibliographical note but a small documentary record: Machoni's own estimate of who spoke the language and where, the loanwords the mission brought in, the 1710 entrada that produced the contact, the explicit reasoning by which the Lules were kept out of encomienda and the frontier military service they owed instead, an epidemic he watched kill adults he could not speak to, and the earlier grammar by Alonso de Bárcena that was lost for want of a printer. The mission purpose and the \"naciones bárbaras\" language of the book are quoted alongside the rest, because an object that printed the achievement and hid the frame would be the weaker source.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/machoni-arte-lengua-lule-1732",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/machoni-arte-lengua-lule-1732.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Antonio Machoni, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua lule y tonocoté (Madrid, 1732)",
    "description": "The only printed grammar and dictionary of Lule and Tonocoté, two Chaco languages that no longer have speakers. A Sardinian Jesuit working on the Tucumán frontier put the languages into rules and got them through a Madrid press in 1732 — a hundred years after an earlier grammar of the same speech was written and lost for want of a printer. The same preliminaries record why the Lules were exempted from encomienda, what they owed instead, and the epidemic that met the mission on arrival.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/machoni-arte-lengua-lule-1732",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Arte, y Vocabulario de la Lengua Lule, y Tonocote, compuestos con facultad de sus superiores por el Padre Antonio Machoni de Cerdeña, de la Compañía de Jesús",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=zyJKAAAAcAAJ"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Antonio Machoni, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua lule y tonocoté (Madrid, 1732)"
  }
}