Ludovico Bertonio, Vocabulario dela lengua Aymara (Juli, 1612)
The great dictionary of Aymara, printed at the Jesuit press of Juli on Lake Titicaca, corrected on the order of an oidor of the Audiencia of Lima and priced by the crown at a real the sheet. Its prologue argues that Aymara is grammatically simpler than Latin, Italian or Spanish, counts barely twenty priests who know it against more than a thousand Aymara towns, and tells its readers that if the Indians profit little from Christian teaching the fault is not wholly theirs.
Why this wins its question: Bertonio's dictionary is famous among Andeanists and almost invisible outside them; where it does surface in English it is a citation for a single Aymara word, and the standard framing of colonial language work is that it was an instrument of control. The instrument was real, and this object says so. What the 1612 preliminaries add, and what no summary carries, is the argument inside the instrument: an explicit comparative judgement that Aymara is less difficult than Latin, Italian and Spanish because it has one declension and one conjugation and produces no barbarisms of gender or tense; a lexicographer choosing words by register so that a preacher is not coarse nor recherché; a count of more than a thousand Aymara towns against barely twenty priests competent in the language; and the flat statement that if the Indians profit little from Christian teaching the fault proceeds also from the carelessness of those sent to teach them. Around it stands the machinery, documented from the same sheets: a press at Juli on Lake Titicaca, correction ordered by an oidor of the Audiencia of Lima, and a royal tassa fixing the price at a real the sheet for a hundred and ten sheets. The costs are here too - the author calls the nation wounded in understanding by its own small capacity, the purpose throughout is conversion, and the people who supplied the words go unnamed.
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 reproduced title page reads "VOCABVLARIO DELA LENGVA AYMARA. PRIMERA PARTE, DONDE POR ABEcedario se ponen en primer lugar los Vocablos dela lengua Española para buscar los que les corresponden enla lengua Aymara", composed by "el P. Ludouico Bertonio Italiano dela Compañia de Iesus enla Prouincia del Piru, delas Indias Occidentales, Natural de la Roca contrada dela Marca de Ancona", and carries the imprint "Impresso enla casa de la Compañia de Iesus de Iuli Pueblo enla Prouincia de Chucuito. Por Francisco del Canto. 1612". The copy read here is not a 1612 copy but Julio Platzmann's photolithographic "Edicion facsimilaria" (Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1879), which reproduces the 1612 sheets page for page.
The author is Italian and the book is a Spanish colonial product, and both halves of that are on the title page. Bertonio gives his own birthplace as La Rocca in the March of Ancona; the press is the Jesuit house at Juli, a town on the Peruvian altiplano in the province of Chucuito; the printer, Francisco del Canto, is the Lima printer; and the dedicatee is Fray Domingo Valderrama Centeno, "Arçobispo, y primer Obispo dela Paz, del Consejo de su Magestad". What is Spanish about the book is the institutional apparatus that commissioned, licensed, corrected, printed and priced it, not the nationality of the man who wrote it.
That apparatus is documented in the book's own preliminaries. The errata are signed by Diego de Torres Rubio, who states that he corrected the Vocabulario, Arte and Phrasis and found them to agree with the original "por comision del Doctor Fernando Arias de Vgarte, Oydor de esta Real Audiencia de los Reyes, del Consejo de su Magestad". The tassa follows, granted at Lima on 21 August 1612, and fixes the price at a real the sheet, recording that the Vocabulario runs to a hundred and ten sheets and the Arte to thirty. The title page prints the result as a line of text: "Esta tassado este Vocabulario a vn Real cada pliego". A dictionary of an Andean language passed through the same royal price control as any other book.
The Latin dedication makes the lexicon a condition of the bishop's office rather than an ornament to it. God, the author tells Valderrama Centeno, has constituted him pastor of those sheep and bishop of that people - a people whom, if one must address them and signify anything to them, it is by no means possible to do so except by using more or less the words and turns of speech "quae hoc nostro lexico traduntur", which are handed down in this our lexicon. The argument is that without the language the jurisdiction is empty.
The prologue records where the language was actually learned and how far it carried. Many fathers of the Society, the author writes, and he himself among them, learned Aymara nowhere but "en este pueblo de Iuli, que es dela Prouincia de Chucuyto, o Lupaca"; going out afterwards to other towns and especially to the Villa de Potosí, "dōde por causa delas Minas ay gran concurso de Indios", they preached to many thousands and heard a very great number of confessions without studying any other language. Although those Indians came from different provinces - he names the Canas, Canchis, Pacases, Carancas, Quillaguas and Charcas - they easily understood and were understood, all being Aymara speakers. The book's reach is measured against the labour draft that assembled its speakers at the silver mountain.
The most striking passage is a piece of comparative grammar that inverts the expected hierarchy. Some readers, the author allows, will be daunted by the obscurity of its ways of speaking and the roundabout idiom of the language, which is genuinely difficult and quite different from ours; "pero sin duda es menos que el dela lengua Latina, Italiana, y Española". His reason is structural: those languages have various declensions of nouns, various conjugations of verbs, various genders and preterites and various cases governing nouns and verbs, whereas "esta Lengua se contenta con vna sola declinacion de todos los nombres y partes declinables, con vna sola conjugacion de todos los verbos", so that no barbarisms or solecisms arise from gender or tense, and "la construcion de las partes es tan simple y llana, que no trae consigo difficultad notable". An Andean language is judged easier than Latin, on grounds a modern typologist would recognise.
The lexicography is deliberate about register, which is not what a crude wordlist would be. Nobody, he writes, should be dismayed by the multitude of words, for a reader who does not take them all and is content with a quarter of those set down here can not only confess the Indians but preach to them "con mucha suficiencia y copia de todo lo que quisiere dezirles". So many are given because it cannot be known precisely which each person will need; and attention has been paid to their quality, "que no sean muy toscos, ni muy exquisitos", since the coarse would be of little profit to ordinary people and the recherché would irritate those who enjoy hearing a man speak his language well.
The prologue then turns into a quantified indictment of the author's own side. It is certain, he writes, that in this Aymara nation there are more than a thousand towns, large and small, or not far short of it; let us now count how many preachers there are who, knowing this language well, with the clarity and sufficiency required, teach the evangelical doctrine. "No dixera mal si afirmara que a penas llegan a veynte", though he will concede fifty. With so many towns and so few preachers, and those not going out to other towns, it may easily be gathered that the faith is not sufficiently planted in this nation, since as the Apostle has it, "Fides ex auditu".
From that count he draws a conclusion about blame that is rare in print in 1612 and is the sentence this object exists to carry: "Confessemos pues que no tienen toda la culpa los indios si aprouechan tan poco en la doctrina euangelica, pues procede tambien del descuydo que nosotros tenemos en enseñarles, y dela poca confiança que teuemos en Nuestro Señor de que haremos algun prouecho por mucho que los doctrinemos." The failure of the mission is attributed to the carelessness of the missionaries and to their own want of confidence, not to the people they were sent to.
The obligation is put in contractual terms. If we take our stipend on the title that we are labourers of his vineyard, he writes, and do not work it, we shall have nothing to answer to its owner when he calls us to account and asks of us the fruits we did not gather because we did not labour in the cultivation. To free ourselves of this fault there is no other remedy than to submit to the work, encouraged by the example of those who took upon themselves the learning of the languages of very barbarous nations in order to bring them to Christ. Learning the language is framed as a debt already owed, not a virtue.
The same prologue carries the judgement that a celebratory reading would drop, and it sits two paragraphs from the passage above. This whole nation of Indians, he writes, is badly injured and wounded in the understanding "con su poca capacidad", and in the will by the multitude of bad habits and great ruin of vices, with little hope of improvement - a description offered as the reason for compassion, in an extended reading of the parable of the man left half dead on the road. The argument that the Indians are not to blame for the mission's failure is built on a premise about their capacity that is itself the period's.
What the book is bounds what it proves. It is a working instrument for conversion, made by a missionary who is arguing in its preliminaries for more men and more effort for his own ministry; the Aymara it records is Aymara as elicited, sorted and alphabetised for Spanish speakers, with the Spanish word first and the Aymara sought against it; and the people who supplied the words are not named anywhere in the pages opened here. It is evidence of what the mission press at Juli achieved and of what one of its members was willing to say in print about his colleagues, not a record of Aymara speakers' own account of their language.