Pedro de Arenas's Vocabulario manual: a layman's Spanish-Nahuatl phrasebook
Almost every printed tool for Nahuatl was made by a friar for other friars. This one was made by a traveller who could not make himself understood on the road, found the big printed dictionary useless for his purpose, wrote out the Spanish sentences he actually needed, and handed them to an unnamed indigenous interpreter to turn into Nahuatl. Its table of contents is a map of what Spaniards and Nahuas said to each other — greetings and sickbeds in one chapter, orders to mine workers in the next.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Nahuatl philology is usually presented as a shelf of friars' artes and vocabularios, compiled to preach and to hear confession. Arenas's manual sits outside that account and is rarely quoted: a book by a layman, for laymen, on the language of the road and the market, and one that admits in its prologue that its Nahuatl was supplied by an indigenous interpreter it does not name. This object gives the prologue in the author's words, prints the table of contents in order, and sets one opened page beside it, where the phrases for asking a man after his wife and his health are followed without a break by the phrases for telling mine workers to hurry. The achievement and the asymmetry are the same object, read off the same sheets.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page reads "VOCABULARIO MANUAL DE LAS LENGUAS Castellana, y Mexicana. EN QVE SE CONTIENEN las palabras, preguntas, y respuestas mas communes, y ordinarias que se suelen offrecer en el trato, y comunicacion entre Españoles, è Indios. COMPUESTO POR PEDRO DE ARENAS", and the imprint is "Impresso Con licencia y aprobacion EN MEXICO. EN LA IMPRENTA DE LOS HErederos de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderon." The book's stated subject is not the language but the traffic between two sets of people.
The copy read here is an undated later Mexico printing, not the first edition. The title page carries NO year: the imprint stops at the name of the Calderon heirs, and the date of 1680 attached to this digitisation is a catalogue attribution rather than something the sheets say. The work was first issued at Mexico in 1611 and was reprinted for two centuries; that 1611 edition was not opened here and nothing in this object rests on it.
The prologue states the author's situation and his method in one paragraph. "Tratando yo vn poco de tiempo con los Naturales de este Reyno", he writes, "passé grande trabajo assi por los caminos como en sus pueblos, por no entenderlos ni ellos entenderme"; he tried "el Vocabulario grande que anda impresso de las lenguas Castellana, y Mexicana" and did not find it fitted "á aquello que à menester saber vn hombre romancista, que no pretende mas elegancia de poder hablar con los Indios, y entenderlos". So he wrote out in Castilian the words, questions and answers that seemed most needed.
The Nahuatl half of the book is not the author's work, and he says so. Once the Spanish was written, "lo enrregue â vn interprete de los naturales de este Reyno, el qual las bolvió en lenguaje Mexicano, desuerte que me sirvió de Vocabulario, que es el contenido en este presente libro". The translator, an indigenous interpreter, is named nowhere in the preliminaries read here: the most reprinted practical Nahuatl book of the colonial period rests on the work of a man whose name it does not print.
The "Vocabulario grande" he found unsuited is very probably Molina's Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary, the only large printed vocabulary of those two languages then in circulation, but Arenas does not name it or its author, and this identification is inference from the description alone.
The "TABLA de las cosas contenidas en este Vocabulario" is the book's argument in list form, and it puts courtesy and command on the same page. Its first headings are "PALABRAS de salutacion", "Lo que se suele dezir, y preguntar á los enfermos", "Lo que se suele dezir consolando á alguna persona", "Preguntas que se suelen hazer buscando alguna persona en su casa", "Quando se và à casa de vn Indio en busca suya", words for a lost thing, questions about the state and weather of a place, and questions about an absent person. Then, without a break in the list, "Las palabras que se suelen dezir á los Indios que trabajan en minas, y labores del campo", "Lo que se suele dezir á vn moço quando le embian por comida à là plaça", and the words a master commonly says.
The table continues over the leaf into an inventory of ordinary life: things asked on arriving at a pueblo, words about the time and weather, names of things of the countryside, "Palabras que se suelen dezir comprando, ò vendiendo mercaderias", words for counting, words "para averiguar cuya es alguna cosa", words "para disculparse de alguna acusacion", "Nombres de la gente, que havita, y sirve en vna casa", names of kin, words of offering and of thanks, domestic animals, hunted animals, "animales bravos y dañosos", wild and domestic birds, "animales venenosos, y savandijas", matters of devotion, and what to ask an official of a trade.
A single opened page shows both registers in the same column of type. Page 11 ends a chapter of questions after a person — "tienes salud, tipactica"; "como esta, quenca / tu muger, in monamic / tu hijo, in mopiltzin"; "has estado enfermo, cuixma otimococohuaya"; "estas mejor, cuix yeachi tipactica" — and then, immediately below, prints the heading "Las palabras mas ordinarias que se suelen dezir à los indios jornaleros que trabajan en minas, y labores del campo", whose first entries are "EA hermanos, O noteicahuane / de se priesa, xicihuican / dad os priesa, xihcihui". The chapter for wage labourers in the mines opens by calling them brothers and telling them to hurry.
What the book is evidence of should be stated narrowly. It is direct evidence of what a Spanish layman thought he needed to be able to say, and of the Nahuatl an interpreter supplied for it. It is not evidence of what Nahuas said back, except in the sense that the answers printed are the answers a Spaniard expected to hear; and the situations it does not cover are as telling as the ones it does. This reading is the compiler's inference from the table of contents and the one page of entries opened here, not a statement the book makes about itself.