Arte de la lengua cahita (Mexico, 1737), the only printed grammar of the language of the Yaqui and Mayo
A grammar and vocabulary of Cahita, the language of the Yaqui and Mayo rivers, written by a Jesuit of the Sinaloa mission and printed at Mexico in 1737 with a catechism by Tomas Basilio. Its editor in 1890 could find only three copies and knew of no other grammar of the language ever published. The book refuses the Latin category of the frequentative, lists the letters Cahita lacks, and says in its dedication that it exists to make preaching quicker.
Why this wins its question: Yaqui and Mayo appear in reference works as Uto-Aztecan languages with a note that early Jesuit materials exist; the one grammar of their language that ever reached a press is normally a line in a bibliography. This object opens the book. It gives the 1737 Mexico imprint from Francisco Javier Sanchez's shop and the reason grammar and catechism share a format; the editor's count of surviving copies - three seen in a lifetime of searching, two his own and one at Guadalajara; the architecture of 373 numbered paragraphs in four parts with a vocabulary of more than seventeen hundred words; paragraph 76 on the letters the language lacks, where the Spanish word chosen to show the missing d is Padre; and paragraph 75, where an eighteenth-century missionary states that none of the constructions he has described is a frequentative in the Latin sense and then defines the Cahita category from its own forms, hoanasisime, buitisisime, nocsasaca. It names the attribution to Juan Bautista de Velasco as an inference and carries it at 0.7, prints the dedication's own statement that the book exists so that preaching may go faster, and explains why a reset, partly normalised 1890 text cannot be cited as the sheets of 1737.
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 volume read here is the nineteenth-century republication, and its title page states the whole shape of the book: "ARTE DE LA LENGUA CAHITA POR UN PADRE DE LA COMPANIA DE JESUS. Contiene las reglas gramaticales y un vocabulario de dicho idioma, usado por los Yaquis y los Mayos en el Estado de Sonora y por algunos indios del rio del Fuerte en el de Sinaloa, y un catecismo de la doctrina cristiana en cahita y espanol por otro padre de la misma Compania. Publicado de nuevo, bajo los auspicios del Sr. Lic. D. Manuel Romero Rubio, Secretario de Gobernacion, por el licenciado EUSTAQUIO BUELNA. Con una introduccion, notas y un pequeno diccionario. MEXICO, IMPRENTA DEL GOBIERNO FEDERAL, EN EL EX-ARZOBISPADO, 1890." The original imprint was anonymous on its title page in the same way.
The first printing is dated and located by the editor: the grammar with its vocabulary, and the catechism that accompanies it, were not printed until 1737, at Mexico, in the shop of Francisco Javier Sanchez, in the same format and the same type, both being meant to form a single volume and to serve two connected ends - the teaching of the language to the missionaries and the religious instruction of the neophytes. More than a century passed between the composition of the texts and their appearance in print.
Its rarity is stated as a count, not as an adjective. The editor writes that no other grammar of that language has been published so far as he knows, and that despite diligent searching he had been able to see only three copies of this one: two in his own possession, gifts of friends resident in Culiacan, and one in the library of Guadalajara which he consulted there, not counting a copy cited by Francisco Pimentel in Lenguas indigenas de Mexico which he never had in his hands.
The authorship is an inference, and the editor presents it as one. He attributes the grammar to the Jesuit Juan Bautista de Velasco, on the ground that Perez de Ribas writes in book 3 chapter 34 of the Historia de los triunfos that this father knew the two principal languages of the province perfectly, "las redujo a arte", and preached in them as in Romance; that Alegre says Velasco had reduced to grammar and vocabulary the most universal language of Sinaloa; and that the most general language of Sinaloa was undoubtedly Cahita. He warns in the same passage against confusing this man with Pedro de Velasco, a missionary in the same province whose grammar Beristain records as a manuscript of one of the lost languages of his parish. The attribution is a chain of inferences from seventeenth and eighteenth-century historians, and this object treats it as probable rather than established.
The catechism bound with it has a firmer author and a date that matters for the history of the northwest. The editor states that it was written by Tomas Basilio, who in the year 1617 was the first to enter to teach the Indians of the Yaqui, together with Andres Perez de Ribas; that the title page names only a father of the Society, missionary in the province, without giving his name; and that the dedication that accompanies it reveals him without ambiguity. The dedication of the grammar itself, dated from the mission and addressed to Francis Xavier, states the purpose in the author's own words: it is an "Arte de lengua Indica, dirigida al bien de las Almas de los Naturales", whose end is to instruct apostolic men "para que con mayor expedicion, y facilidad puedan predicar, y atender al bien espiritual de los pobres Indios."
The grammar is a systematic description in 373 numbered paragraphs, in four parts: the first, in six paragraphs, on the formation of preterites, futures and the passive voice of the verb, the formation of nouns and of verbs, the letters of the language, their pronunciation and the placing of words, the composition of expressions and the syntax of the sentence; the second, in three, on the noun, the pronouns and the semipronouns; the third, in three, on the conjugations and tenses, the participles and other matters touching the verb; the fourth, in four, on prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions and interjections. A Spanish-Cahita vocabulary of more than seventeen hundred words follows, and then the doctrine.
Paragraph 76, which opens the section headed "Colocacion de palabras, letras de que carece esta lengua, y pronunciacion de las que tiene", records the sound system by subtraction and by loanword evidence: "En esta lengua no hay g, ni x, ni tampoco parece haber d, y algunos vocablos castellanos que tienen d, apenas son pronunciados con d, v. g. Padre, unos dicen Pale, otros Pare; las demas letras se hallan, y todas con rigurosa pronunciacion", with a note added in the republication that f, ll and n with tilde are also absent. The Spanish word chosen to demonstrate the missing consonant is Padre.
The grammar's most interesting moment is a refusal of the Latin template it was written inside. In paragraph 75 the author says that none of the three constructions he has just described "se llama frecuentativo en el sentido que se usa en el idioma latino", and then defines the Cahita category on its own evidence: frequentative verbs are expressed with sisime for the singular and sasaca for the plural, added in place of the future particle naque, so that a man who seems to have no other office than to go visiting all the towns is hoanasisime from the verb hoanare, to visit; one who by habit runs away is buitisisime; and of talkers who chatter everything one says nocsasaca. The preceding paragraph gives the same treatment to the progressive, with buicsime for one who goes along singing and buicsaca for many.
The Cahita country and the dialect of the printed grammar are described by the editor, and both bear on how the book should be used. Cahita was spoken on the Yaqui and Mayo rivers towards the sea, on most of the river Fuerte and with varying extension on the Sinaloa and Mocorito, that is between the Yaqui in the north and the small Mocorito in the south; the Tehueco was the current dialect in parts of Sinaloa and Mocorito and it was in Tehueco, the editor believes, that Velasco wrote his grammar, taking care to note its differences from the other dialects, which he found few enough that anyone possessing one understands the others without effort. The editor adds that by 1890 Spanish was the language generally used across the region and that towns speaking only Cahita were rare.
What the 1890 volume is, and why this object is tiered secondary. The editor set the 1737 text in new type rather than reproducing it, and states what he changed: the Cahita words in the original carry a great orthographic confusion which sometimes makes them hard to recognise, b, v and u used indifferently in some places, ch or tz in others, hu for u or the reverse, y for i or the reverse, pronouns and verbal particles sometimes joined to other words and sometimes independent, so that no orthography can be founded on such variety; he says he followed a uniform manner of writing as far as he could, "dados mis escasos conocimientos en el idioma", abstaining wherever he was not fully sure or feared changing the sense of the words. He also regrets that the printing of the grammar and vocabulary could not be done under the author's care, dead many years before, since many mistakes would have been avoided. A reset and partly normalised text is not the sheets of 1737, and the tier follows the reading rather than the title.
The editor's own frame should be read with the same care he asks for the original. Buelna writes that Cahita as known in his day must have been formed from the speech of the aborigines, deeply influenced and modified by that of the Nahuas or Aztecs, with which it has a remarkable analogy and kinship, that formation being the work of the proximity and influx "de esta raza superior" long settled on the Gila. That is a nineteenth-century racial explanation offered where a modern account would give the Uto-Aztecan family relationship, and it is one reason his introduction is registered as a separate source at lower reliability than the text he reprints.