Juan de Córdova's Zapotec grammar and dictionary (Mexico, 1578)
The first printed grammar of Zapotec and the dictionary printed beside it, both from Pedro Balli's shop at Mexico City in 1578. Their author had marched to Cíbola with Vázquez de Coronado before he took the Dominican habit, and finished the two books in a poor convent after the order deposed him from its highest office. The grammar ends in a treatise on Zapotec omens and marriage — recorded in detail, and then used to argue that Zapotec marriages had not been marriages at all.
Why this wins its question: What wins this question today is a catalogue line — Juan de Córdova, Arte en lengua zapoteca, Mexico, 1578 — with a date that three bibliographies do not agree on and nothing about the contents. This object gives the contents: the omens, the diviner's beans, the eight causes of separation, the Toledo comparison at folio 68 verso, and the sentence from Vitoria with which the author concludes that none of it was marriage. It also gives the author's route to the work, from Coronado's march to Cíbola to a deposition at Yanhuitlán, and states plainly which of the three dates rests on a copy someone had in hand. The achievement and its cost come off the same pages, at one remove through a cataloguer who says where he is reporting and where he is arguing.
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 grammar's title page is transcribed by Icazbalceta as "ARTE EN LEN|GVA ZAPOTECA COM|puesto por el muy reuerendo padre|Fray Iuan de Cordoua, de la|orden de los Predica|dores desta nue|ua España", printed "EN MÉXICO. En casa de Pedro Balli. Año de 1578". It is an octavo in roman type, with seven preliminary leaves and 125 folios of text, and its colophon dates the finished sheets to the eighth day of August 1578.
Three licences stand in the preliminaries — the viceroy Martín Enríquez on 1 July 1578, the bishop of Antequera (Oaxaca) in June of the same year, and the Dominican provincial Fr. Gabriel de S. José, who added leave to print a short confessionario in Zapotec of which no other notice survives. Icazbalceta gives the bishop's licence as 18 June in his collation of the leaves and as 8 June in the argument he builds on it a few pages later, and does not reconcile the two.
The bishop's licence is what ties the two books together: it permits the grammar because, taken with "el Vocabulario que agora estais imprimiendo de la dicha lengua", the pair will be useful to anyone wishing to learn it. Córdova's own dedication says the provincial first ordered him to print the dictionary and then to make a grammar as its assistant, "puerta y entrada para los principiantes" — the dictionary was the object and the grammar the way in.
The date of the dictionary is contested and this corpus does not settle it. Icazbalceta never saw a copy; Beristáin gives Pedro Ocharte, 1571, in quarto, and appears to have had the book in hand; Orozco y Berra cites it as of 1578 from a source Icazbalceta could not identify. Icazbalceta argues for 1578 from the bishop's licence and from Burgoa's statement that Córdova finished both works after his deposition, which was in October 1570.
An independent bibliography compiled in New York and finished in London multiplies the same books further. Ludewig's list of 1858 enters the Zapotec dictionary twice — as Mexico, 1578, quarto, and as a "Vocabulario de la Lengua Zapoteca, ó Diccionario Hispano-Zapoteco", Mexico, 1571, quarto — and gives the grammar as Mexico, 1564, in duodecimo, with the remark that De Souza dates it 1578. Three dates for two books, from a compiler with no stake in the Mexican quarrel.
The author reached Zapotec by way of the conquest. Born at Córdoba in Spain in 1503, he studied Latin, went for a soldier, served Charles V in Flanders and Germany as ensign of a Spanish company, crossed to Mexico, and in 1540 followed Francisco Vázquez de Coronado on the expedition to Cíbola. He returned from it, renounced the world, and professed as a Dominican on 16 December 1543 at the age of forty; ordained about 1548, he was sent that year into the Zapotec country.
The books were finished by a man the order had just removed. Elected provincial in 1568, Córdova governed with a severity his friars would not carry; at the intermediate chapter held at Yanhuitlán on 7 October 1570 the complaints were such that he was admonished, and on refusing to soften he was suspended from office, whereupon he knelt before the definitor. The viceroy Enríquez, as vice-patron, offered to intervene, and Córdova travelled to Mexico City for the sole purpose of dissuading him. He went back to the poor house of Tlacuechahuaya as its prior and there completed the grammar and the dictionary, dying at Oaxaca towards the end of the century.
The praise the dictionary drew is worth reading twice. Burgoa calls it a work "tan grande y tan copioso" that after so many years it seemed a marvel that a man should come to such full knowledge "de una lengua bárbara", with no word in the language absent from it and several senses to each entry, matched to the variety of the provinces of that people. The compliment to the lexicographer and the contempt for the language are in the same sentence.
The grammar does not stay a grammar. It carries notices of the Zapotec calendar and of what Icazbalceta calls the antiquities of the Zapotecs. He prints only the second part, having already passed the calendar material to Manuel Orozco y Berra, who used it in book IV, chapter 1, of his Historia Antigua y de la Conquista de México — so the calendar entered nineteenth-century Mexican scholarship out of a sixteenth-century language manual.
Under the heading NOTABLE the book records omens: the snake called pélla, first and chief of them, read differently for each kind of snake; the owl, tăma or tămaxĭhui; the bird the Nahuatl speakers call tecolotl, pequĭa or pĭquia in Zapotec; the squirrel or gopher, pechijça, pichijça or pepaa; a bird that sings in the hills, cuĕga. The reader is given the Zapotec words, not a summary of them.
The same passage sets out how marriages were decided. A man who wished to marry went first to the diviner, the colanij, with both names; the diviner took beans to the number the two names came to, counted them by twos, then by threes, then by fours, and read children or childlessness out of the remainders, up to five countings. Eight recognised causes of separation follow, the second of them — no children — named as the principal one.
Córdova then turns the ethnography against its subject. From the list of separations he infers that these Indians had no marriage, and cites the master Victoria, who on hearing such accounts had written "Videtur inter istos barbaros nullum fuisse matrimonium". The finding was not academic: whether a union counted as a marriage governed what the church could dissolve and what a convert was held to. The fullest surviving record of Zapotec marriage practice was made by a man arguing it was not marriage.
One passage puts the two languages on the same footing. Writing at folio 68 verso on how Zapotec words are pronounced differently from place to place, Córdova adds that it is the same among ourselves and in our Spain, where those of Old Castile say haçer and in Toledo hazer, xugar and in Toledo jugar, yerro and in Toledo hierro, alagar and in Toledo halagar. Icazbalceta reads the remark as evidence that the ç and the z, and the x and the j, were still distinct, and that the h was aspirated at Toledo — so the aside is also a witness for the history of Spanish.
Zapotec printing neither began nor ended with Córdova. Pedro de Feria, born 1524, a missionary among the Zapotecs and bishop of Chiapas from 1575, left a Zapotec vocabulary, a confessionario and a doctrina; Pedro Cueva published at Mexico in 1607 a Zapotec grammar framed on Nebrija's Latin one; Cristóbal de Agüero, born in 1600 and professed at Oaxaca in 1618, gave his dictionary to the bishop of Monterroso for publication and printed a Miscellaneo Espiritual in Zapotec at Mexico in 1666; the grammar of Antonio Pozo and Gerónimo Moreno's treatise on Zapotec verb roots stayed in manuscript.
What survived is thin, and the record shows how easily authorship was lost. Icazbalceta describes the grammar from the single copy that had belonged to José F. Ramírez, wanting folio 81, sold as lot 921 for fifty pounds, and states that he knows no other copy by sight or by report; of the dictionary he had seen nothing at all. Alonso Fernández miscalled the author Pedro rather than Juan, and on that slip the bibliographers Quétif and Échard gave the dictionary to Fr. Pedro de Feria.