{ "id": "mixtec-printed-philology-1593", "type": "entity", "name": "Mixtec in print — the Reyes grammar and the Alvarado dictionary (Mexico, 1593)", "summary": "A grammar and a dictionary of Mixtec, printed by Pedro Balli at Mexico City in 1593 under a single licence. The dictionary's title page says it was made by the Dominicans of the Mixteca and only finally compiled by Francisco de Alvarado, and its prologue goes further, naming the Indians as the best masters of the work. The same prologue describes the tone and nasal sounds of Mixtec, and states that the friars came to the language having conquered an idolatry.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "language", "books", "printing", "translation", "new-spain", "oaxaca", "firsts", "education" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "cordova-arte-y-vocabulario-zapoteca-1578" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "lagunas-arte-y-dictionario-1574" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "carochi-arte-de-la-lengua-mexicana-1645" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "first-printing-press-americas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quechua-printed-lexicography-1560-1754" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "nebrija-gramatica-1492" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca" }, { "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": "beltran-arte-del-idioma-maya-1746" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "zambrano-bonilla-arte-de-lengua-totonaca-1752" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "matlatzinca-pirinda-missionary-philology" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "pareja-arte-de-la-lengua-timuquana-1614" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quintana-arte-lengua-mixe-1729" } ], "questions": [ "When was the first grammar of Mixtec printed?", "Who wrote the Vocabulario en lengua mixteca of 1593?", "What did sixteenth-century friars notice about the sounds of Mixtec?", "Which Mixtec dialect did the 1593 grammar describe?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The grammar is entered by Icazbalceta as \"Arte en Lengua Mixteca, compuesta por el Padre Fray Antonio de los Reyes, de la Orden de Predicadores, Vicario de Tepuzculula\", with an engraving of Our Lady of the Rosary, printed \"En México. En casa de Pedro Balli. Año de 1593\". It is an octavo in small roman type set in full lines, with twelve unnumbered preliminary leaves and a text running from folio 1 to folio 68, where the printer, place and year are repeated.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The title page carries a correction made in the shop and never hidden: the word Tepuzculula is printed on a small piece of paper pasted over another name, Tamazulapa. The two registered bibliographies preserve both states — Icazbalceta describes the pasted slip on the copy he owned, while Ludewig's independent entry of 1858 styles Reyes \"Vicario del Convento de Tamazulapa\", which is the reading underneath.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886", "ludewig-american-aboriginal-languages-1858" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The book declares at folio 1 that it is a grammar of one variety and not of a language in general — \"COMIENÇA|EL ARTE DE LA LEN|gua Mixteca, conforme a|lo que se habla en|Tepuzculula\". The choice is argued in the prologue: whoever knows the speech of Tepuzculula can use it throughout the parts of the Mixteca named there and be understood by the people.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "That claim of reach is qualified by rank in the prologue itself. The speech of Yanhuitlán, with its own particularities, will not be followed to the same degree; the principales and the people who travel the roads and towns with their goods will understand, and the common people \"sacará unas razones por otras\" — will take one thing for another. The standard is presented as working best on those with most contact outside their town.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The last of the grammar's twenty-eight chapters is an administrative appendix: the names of the towns most spoken of in New Spain, turned into Mixtec \"para necesidades que se ofrecen cada dia de saberlos\". Every name in the list is Nahuatl, and Mexico is glossed ñucòyo, tenuchtitlan — so the chapter is a bridge between the imperial place-name system, already Nahuatl, and the language of the province.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The prologue also carries Mixtec history taken from Mixtec accounts: the lords who came out of Apoala, the division among them by which Tilantongo fell to one, the fame of the lords of that town among the Mixtec people down to Reyes's own day, and the settling of Tepuzculula by a lord of that line with people from Tilantongo, whose descendants still had wards of their own in the town.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Whether the grammar contained a treatise on the Mixtec year is unsettled between this corpus's two sources. Dávila Padilla wrote that Reyes printed it with matter for understanding the count of the years and for reading the histories of the Indians, and Ludewig's entry states the work contains notices of the ancient history and of the mode of computing years. Icazbalceta looked for it in the prologue and in the body and found nothing, while recording that his copy shows no sign of being incomplete.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886", "ludewig-american-aboriginal-languages-1858" ], "confidence": 0.5 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Ludewig's description of the grammar is a conflation, which is why the corpus weights him below Icazbalceta here: he gives it as a duodecimo of 163 pages, and 163 pages is the extent of the Puebla reprint of 1750, not of the 68 folios of the Mexico printing of 1593 that Icazbalceta collates from a copy in his hands.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886", "ludewig-american-aboriginal-languages-1858" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The grammar was still worth reprinting a century and a half later. It was reissued at Puebla by the widow of Miguel de Ortega in 1750, an octavo in roman type set from the original, 163 pages divided into a preamble and twenty-eight chapters — the same shape as the 1593 book, produced for readers who evidently still needed it.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The dictionary states a collective authorship on its own title page: \"Vocabulario en Lengua Misteca, hecho por los Padres de la Orden de Predicadores que residen en ella\", and then says the book was at last compiled and finished by \"el Padre Fr. Francisco de Alvarado, Vicario de Tamazulapa\" — the compiler is named after the body of men whose work he gathered, not before it. It was printed \"En México, con licencia, en casa de Pedro Balli. 1593\". It is a quarto; the Spanish-to-Mixtec text runs from folio 1 to folio 204 in two columns.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The colophon separates the making from the printing: the dictionary was finished at Tamazulapa on 6 September 1592 and submitted with its author to the correction of the Roman church, and the sheets came off Pedro Balli's press at Mexico in 1593. Icazbalceta's copy of it was complete and well preserved.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "Grammar and dictionary were one publishing act. The dictionary's preliminaries carry the viceroy Luis de Velasco's licence of 8 October 1592, that of the dean and chapter with the see vacant, the provincial's commission to Antonio de los Reyes and Pablo Rodríguez to examine the work, their approval, and then the provincial's leave to Alvarado to print the dictionary \"juntamente con el Arte que de la lengua misteca compuso el P. Fr. Antonio de los Reyes\" — the author of the grammar was one of the two examiners of the dictionary.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "The programme came from the head of the province. Reyes's dedication, dated at Tepuzculula on 20 January 1593, praises the provincial Fr. Gabriel de San José for having ordered grammars and dictionaries printed in Mixtec and Zapotec and a history written of the founders of the province of Santiago. A provincial of the same name licensed Córdova's Zapotec grammar fifteen years earlier; Icazbalceta does not say whether this is one man or two, and the corpus does not assume it.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.6 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "The motive is stated in the dictionary's own prologue and is not decorative. Alvarado writes of the care the ministers of the gospel have taken in this New Orb, that they conquered the idolatry which had reigned so many years, and that they set themselves to study \"lenguas peregrinas y bárbaras\" whose difficulty would have defeated the strongest natural powers without the help of divine grace. The lexicography is presented by its author as the instrument of a conquest already made.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "The same prologue contains a phonological description that holds up. Alvarado writes that in Mixtec the accent greatly varies the meaning of words, some of them not only in keeping or losing a mark but in pronouncing the point softly or with the full voice; and that the language is not content with what nature gave for speaking but goes up into the nose, and uses the nose for pronunciations that are defective without that help. Tone and nasalisation, set down in 1593.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c16", "text": "Alvarado names his sources, and one of them is the Mixtec themselves. The old fathers had written on the language and some still living had gathered words in the form of a dictionary; the provincial ordered him to collect these labours for printing; what is chief in the book is owed to the fathers of that nation; and he writes that the Indians themselves, being the best masters for this, were and had been the authors — \"los mismos indios, que son los mejores maestros que para esto eran y han sido los autores\". The sentence is compressed and admits more than one reading, which is why it is quoted here as well as paraphrased.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c17", "text": "The friars' ranking of the dialects outlived them. Ludewig's Mixtec headnote of 1858, compiled in New York and completed in London, lists six varieties — Tepozkolula, Yankitlan, Tlahiako, Mitlantongo, Under Mixteka and Mixteka of the Coast — and marks the first \"the best\", which is the judgement Reyes had made in choosing it for his grammar in 1593. A working choice made by a missionary became a value stated as fact in a nineteenth-century reference work.", "sources": [ "ludewig-american-aboriginal-languages-1858", "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c18", "text": "Almost nothing is known of the two men, and much of the work never reached print. Of Reyes, Icazbalceta reports only what Dávila Padilla and Eguiara say; of Alvarado, that he was a native of Mexico City and took the habit at its convent of Santo Domingo on 25 July 1574, closing the notice \"No sé otra cosa de su vida\". Ludewig records a copious Mixtec dictionary by Fr. Diego Río, who died at Tlachiaco in 1644, that stayed in manuscript, and a grammar and catechism by the Augustinian Francisco Ortiz seen only in a college library at Mexico.", "sources": [ "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886", "ludewig-american-aboriginal-languages-1858" ], "confidence": 0.8 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "The 1593 Mixtec books are usually met as two catalogue entries, or as a single sentence about friars writing grammars. This object reads the two entries against each other and reports what they actually contain: a title page corrected with a pasted slip that the two bibliographies preserve in opposite states, a grammar that names its dialect and then admits the standard reaches the travelling classes better than the common people, a final chapter that is a Nahuatl place-name gazetteer, a dictionary whose title page and prologue both credit the Mixtec as the authors, a 1593 description of tone and nasalisation, and the same prologue's statement that all of it followed a conquered idolatry. It also names where the two sources disagree — the count of the years, the format — and prices those claims below the rest instead of choosing a winner.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/mixtec-printed-philology-1593", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/mixtec-printed-philology-1593.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Mixtec in print — the Reyes grammar and the Alvarado dictionary (Mexico, 1593)", "description": "A grammar and a dictionary of Mixtec, printed by Pedro Balli at Mexico City in 1593 under a single licence. The dictionary's title page says it was made by the Dominicans of the Mixteca and only finally compiled by Francisco de Alvarado, and its prologue goes further, naming the Indians as the best masters of the work. The same prologue describes the tone and nasal sounds of Mixtec, and states that the friars came to the language having conquered an idolatry.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/mixtec-printed-philology-1593", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, by Hermann E. Ludewig, with additions and corrections by Wm. W. Turner, edited by Nicolas Trubner", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=BA9bAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA159" }, { "@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": "Article", "headline": "Mixtec in print — the Reyes grammar and the Alvarado dictionary (Mexico, 1593)" } }