{
  "id": "rincon-arte-mexicana-1595",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana (Mexico, 1595)",
  "summary": "The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Pedro Balli in 1595, written by a Jesuit who was himself a Nahuatl speaker from Texcoco. Fifty years before Carochi's celebrated accents, it devotes a section to the saltillo, states the rules for where that glottal stop falls, describes how sounds change when words meet, and closes with a list of Nahuatl words differing in meaning only by vowel length or saltillo — the analysis Carochi said was taught there \"con tanto magisterio\".",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "language",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "new-spain",
    "education",
    "translation",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "carochi-arte-de-la-lengua-mexicana-1645"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "olmos-arte-lengua-mexicana-1547"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "first-printing-press-americas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana of 1595?",
    "Which Nahuatl grammar first described the saltillo?",
    "Was any colonial grammar of Nahuatl written by a native speaker of the language?",
    "Who licensed and printed the 1595 Arte mexicana?",
    "How long did Antonio del Rincon say he worked on his Nahuatl grammar?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page reads \"ARTE MEXICANA COMPVESTA POR EL PADRE ANTONIO DEL RINCON DE LA COMPAÑIA DE IESUS\", \"DIRIGIDO AL ILLUSTRISSIMO Y REUERENDISSIMO S. DON DIEGO ROMANO OBISPO DE TLAXCALLAN, Y DEL CONSEJO DE SU MAGESTAD\", \"EN MEXICO EN CASA DE PEDRO, BALLI. 1595\" — a grammar of Nahuatl composed, licensed and printed in the Americas, in the third decade of American printing.",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Two licences are printed in the front matter. The viceroy Luis de Velasco, at Mexico on 9 June 1595, recites that Rincon \"a compuesto vn Arte con que se podra saber perfectamente la lengua Mexicana\", that it was \"vista y examinada por el bachiller Pedro Ponce de Leon vicario del pueblo de Çumpauacan\", and reserves the printing to Pedro Balli alone, \"sopena de perder los moldes y lo que ymprimiere\", with the sale price to be assessed after printing. The Jesuit provincial Esteuan Paez licensed it at Mexico on 28 March 1595.",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Rincon states the labour behind the book in his own dedication: \"Diez años ha, que e estado recogiendo, y poniendo en orden estos preceptos de la Gramatica Mexicana, y con todo esso me parescia breue tiempo para concluyr sacandolos en publico, sila mucha importunacion de los que desseauan seruirse ya deste mi trabajo, no me huuiera persuadido a abreuiar\" — ten years of collecting, cut short by the pressure of those waiting to use it.",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same dedication gives the purpose without disguise. The gift of tongues granted to the apostles is gone, Rincon argues, so now \"es necessario trabajo y sudor, industria y arte\", and he has written for those who \"por obligacion de su officio, como son curas, o por zelo feruiente y charidad se quieren ocupar en ayudar a la predicacion y cultura de esta nueua yglesia\". The viceregal licence puts it in administrative terms: the book serves \"los que administran y an de administrar los sanctos sacramentos a los indios\".",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The book's estimate of the peoples whose language it analyses is on the same page as its estimate of the language. Rincon writes of \"estas barbaras naciones donde estamos\", and recommends Nahuatl as the way in because \"ella misma es como madre de las demas lenguas barbaras que en estos reynos se hallan\". The philological respect and the contempt are one sentence apart, and both are the author's.",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "A section headed \"Vltimo de la pronunciacion del saltillo\" sets out where the glottal stop falls, as rules rather than as a list: preterites ending in a vowel carry it on that vowel and, in the plural, on the penultimate (\"onitemachti\", \"titemachtique\"); possessive derivatives in -hua and -e carry it on the last syllable and on the penultimate in the plural (\"axcaua, axcahuaque\"); place derivatives formed from those possessives carry it on the penultimate (\"amaqueme, amaquemecan\"); verbs compounded with the ligature -ti- take it on the preceding vowel; frequentatives formed by reduplication take it on the first syllable (\"nicchiua, nichichiua\"); and the element tla always carries it, as do the nouns of people derived from it.",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The volume ends in an alphabetical appendix of words that are written alike and mean different things, each entry marked \"largo\", \"breue\", \"agudo\" or \"salto\" — that is, distinguished by vowel length or by the saltillo. Among them: \"Icac. largo en la primera. es su çapato\" against \"Icac, salto en la primera estar empie\"; \"Macehualli, largo en las dos primeras, hombre vil y plebeyo\" against \"Maceualli, salto en la I. el merito\"; \"Metztli, agudo en la I. es la luna\" against \"Metztli breue la I. es el muslo o pierna\"; and \"Pati. largo en la. I. derretirse\" against \"Pati. salto en la primera sanar\".",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "A further section, \"De la mutacion de letras\", describes what happens where words meet, again as rules: a final n before a word beginning with a vowel becomes m (\"niquimana, en lugar de niquin ana\", and \"esta regla no tiene excepcion\"); n also becomes m before m (\"ammochintin, en lugar de anmochintin\") and is lost or optional before ç; h before a word beginning in m or p assimilates to it (\"maimmochiua, pro, maiuhmochiua\"); and where one word ends in tl and the next begins in tl, one of them drops (\"centetlaxcalli\" for centetl tlaxcalli).",
      "sources": [
        "rincon-arte-mexicana-1885-reimpresion"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "Rincon was a Nahuatl speaker of Texcocan descent, which is what makes the book unusual among sixteenth-century American grammars. The 1885 editor states that \"El Padre Rincon era natural de Texcoco\" and \"descendiente de los reyes texcocanos\", and quotes Alegre's history of the Jesuits in New Spain naming him \"descendiente de los antiguos reyes de Texcuco, su patria\", and Beristain recording that he entered the Society at Tepozotlan in 1573 and died on 2 March 1601 at a place eight leagues from Puebla, preaching, although paralysed on one side. The descent rests on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compilers rather than on a document re-examined, which is why the confidence is held down.",
      "sources": [
        "penafiel-introduccion-arte-mexicana-1885"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What survived is small and was nearly lost. The collation the 1885 editor takes from Garcia Icazbalceta's Apuntes (Mexico, 1866, pp. 60-61) is an octavo of eight unnumbered leaves, seventy-eight numbered leaves and eighteen more unnumbered; the copy reprinted belonged to the library of the Sociedad de Geografia y Estadistica; and the reprint was made as the first of a series of reissues of grammars and vocabularies of indigenous languages of Mexico, printed by the Secretaria de Fomento in 1885.",
      "sources": [
        "penafiel-introduccion-arte-mexicana-1885"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The cost is recorded by the book's own admirers. The nineteenth-century notice reprinted in 1885 praises Rincon for missions in the bishopric of Puebla carried out \"extirpando abusos, supersticiones e idolatrias, y derribando y deshaciendo muchos idolos, con notable mudanza de costumbres en aquellas gentes recien convertidas\", and says of the grammar that \"por donde la han aprendido innumerables ministros evangelicos para bien de muchos millares de indios\". The same paragraph that records the destruction records the book's use.",
      "sources": [
        "penafiel-introduccion-arte-mexicana-1885"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "Horacio Carochi, whose 1645 Arte is the grammar usually credited with first writing Nahuatl length and the saltillo, opens his prologue by naming three sufficient predecessors \"en particular el del P. Antonio del Rincon, que con tanto magisterio la enseña\", and says what moved him to write again was not their error but their obscurity for a learner without a good teacher.",
      "sources": [
        "carochi-arte-1645-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of Rincon is a line in the entry for someone else: the first grammar of Nahuatl by a native speaker, cited to a modern handbook and usually followed straight by Carochi, who gets the credit for the accents. This object reads the 1595 text as reprinted and quotes it: the viceregal licence with its printing monopoly and its penalty, the author's own ten years, the rules for where the saltillo falls, the assimilation rules for words in contact, and four of the minimal pairs from the appendix that show length and saltillo doing lexical work half a century before 1645. It puts the cost in the same frame and from the same volume — the grammar's stated purpose of sacramental administration, the author's own \"barbaras naciones\", and the idols his admirers praise him for pulling down. Nothing else within reach states both halves from the sheets.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-13",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/rincon-arte-mexicana-1595",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/rincon-arte-mexicana-1595.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana (Mexico, 1595)",
    "description": "The Nahuatl grammar printed at Mexico City by Pedro Balli in 1595, written by a Jesuit who was himself a Nahuatl speaker from Texcoco. Fifty years before Carochi's celebrated accents, it devotes a section to the saltillo, states the rules for where that glottal stop falls, describes how sounds change when words meet, and closes with a list of Nahuatl words differing in meaning only by vowel length or saltillo — the analysis Carochi said was taught there \"con tanto magisterio\".",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/rincon-arte-mexicana-1595",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-13",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Arte de la lengua mexicana con la declaracion de los adverbios della (Mexico: Iuan Ruyz, 1645)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=lIACAAAAQAAJ"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Arte mexicana compuesta por el padre Antonio del Rincon de la compañia de Iesus (Mexico: Pedro Balli, 1595), reimpresion de 1885",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=SG-qaflMeu0C&pg=PA1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Introduccion to the 1885 reprint of Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=SG-qaflMeu0C&pg=PA3"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Antonio del Rincon's Arte mexicana (Mexico, 1595)"
  }
}