Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611)
The folio dictionary printed at Madrid by Luis Sanchez in 1611 in which Castilian is explained in Castilian, with an etymology attached to almost every headword. Covarrubias worked alone, named the living Arabic scholars he leaned on, alphabetised by sound rather than by spelling, and warned his reader that some etymologies he prints are false ones he recorded because they were current. Arabic had reached his alphabet; at the opening checked here, the American loan-words had not.
Why this wins its question: Covarrubias is usually handled in one line — the first dictionary to explain Spanish in Spanish — and then set aside, with the etymologies dismissed as fanciful by writers who do not quote them, and with the priority label repeated by writers who have not opened the book to see that its author makes no such claim. This object goes to the 1611 sheets instead and lets the book speak in its own preliminaries: the author disclaiming completeness, naming the king's Arabic interpreter as his authority, admitting on the page that he prints vulgar etymologies beside the sound ones, asking to be corrected in a second edition he did not live to see, and a crown clerk fixing what the volume may be sold for down to the maravedi. It also does the small piece of work nobody does, which is to open the alphabet at the place where cacao should be and report what is printed there instead. The achievement and the defect are quoted from the same volume, so neither can be reported without the other.
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 "TESORO DE LA LENGVA CASTELLANA, O ESPAÑOLA. COMPVESTO POR EL LICENCIADO Don Sebastian de Cobarruuias Orozco, Capellan de su Magestad, Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la santa Yglesia de Cuenca, y Consultor del santo Oficio de la Inquisicion", is "DIRIGIDO A LA MAGESTAD CATOLICA del Rey Don Felipe III. nuestro señor", and is printed "CON PRIVILEGIO. En Madrid, por Luis Sanchez, impressor del Rey N.S. Año del Señor M.DC.XI."
The book's own preliminaries do not agree on its name. The title page offers both forms at once, "CASTELLANA, O ESPAÑOLA"; the royal licence calls it "vn libro intitulado Tesoro de la lengua Española"; the price certificate calls it "Tesoro de la lengua Castellana"; and the errata sheet splits the difference with "ERRATAS DEL TESORO DE LA lengua Española Castellana". The two adjectives were still interchangeable in print in 1611.
The licence is a royal cedula in the king's voice. It recites that Covarrubias "auiades compuesto vn libro intitulado Tesoro de la lengua Española, en que os auiades ocupado mucho tiempo, y era muy vtil y prouechoso para todos los nuestros Reynos", grants him ten years of exclusive printing, requires the sheets to be checked against the original by a crown-appointed corrector before sale, and is dated "en Lerma a seys dias del mes de Mayo, de mil y seyscientos y diez años", signed "YO EL REY" and countersigned by Iorge de Touar.
The same cedula prices unauthorised printing. Anyone who printed or sold the book without the author's licence lost the copies, the moulds and the equipment and incurred a fine of "cincuenta mil marauedis", divided in three — one third to the royal chamber, one third to the judge who sentenced, one third to whoever denounced the offence — with a further ten thousand maravedis for officials who failed to enforce it.
The retail price was fixed by the state, not by the bookseller. The tassa signed by Geronimo Nuñez de Leon at Madrid on 14 November 1611 records that the Council valued each sheet at five maravedis, that the book runs to 346 sheets, and that it may therefore be sold at "mil y setecientos y treynta marauedis" and "no a mas" — printed again in larger type as "Tiene este libro 346. pliegos, que conforme a su tassa monta cincuenta reales y treynta marauedis."
Covarrubias explains the word Tesoro in his title as borrowed rather than invented: he writes that "por conformarme con los que han hecho diccionarios copiosos y llamadolos Tesoros, me atreuo a vsar deste termino por titulo de mi obra". He makes no claim in the preface to be doing something no one has done before, and he says plainly that to give the origin of every Castilian word "seria impossible: yo hare lo que pudiere".
He describes the work as a fight with foreign languages carried on by one man. "Yo he buscado con toda diligencia este Tesoro de la lengua Castellana, y lidiado con diferentes fieras, que para mi y para los que saben poco, tales se pueden llamar las lenguas estrangeras: Latina, Griega, Hebrea, y Arabiga, y con las demas vulgares, la Francesa, y la Toscana, sin la que llaman Castellana antigua."
Where he was not competent he says so and names his authorities. Of Arabic he writes that "casi todos somos iguales, fuera de algunos pocos que la saben: y assi hemos de dar credito a los peritos en ella", and then credits two of them by name — "Yo he consultado a Diego de Vrrea, interprete del Rey nuestro señor, y visto algunos escritos del padre Guadix, de ambos me he aprouechado."
The most damaging thing said about the Tesoro's etymologies is said in the Tesoro. Covarrubias writes that to satisfy every kind of reader, "en el discurso de algunas etymologias, no solo se traen las legitimas y verdaderas, pero a vezes las vulgares introduzidas por los idiotas" — the popular derivations are printed alongside the defensible ones, and the book does not always mark which is which.
He closes the preface by treating the volume as a first attempt rather than a monument: "Yo pido con toda humildad, y reconocimiento de mi poco saber, que todo aquello en que yo errare, se me emiende con caridad, y se me aduierta para otra impression." The sheets read here are that first impression, uncorrected by its author.
The alphabet is ordered by sound rather than by learned spelling, and the preface tells the reader so. Nobody should be shocked, he writes, that the words are written "como suenan, sin guardar la propia ortografia": "pongo por exemplo, Philipo, no se ha de buscar en la letra ph sino en la f. Geronimo en la G. y no en la H. Tema en la T. y no en la th." Words not found under z are to be looked for under ç, and many under f in the H, "como fidalgo, hidalgo".
Setting the book strained the press. Covarrubias says the diversity of origins forced him to go to the sources and "vsar de sus propios caracteres, en la lengua Griega, y la Hebrea", so that the reading is uneven and only a Latinist gets the whole of it. The errata sheet, signed by the crown corrector "El Licenciado Murcia dela Llana" at Madrid on 19 October 1611, runs to a full folio page and includes corrections to words set in Hebrew type.
The first correction in that errata list is to the preface itself: "En la Epistola al Letor, donde dize vnde rosa, lee ceu rosa" — a misprint in the Latin couplet Covarrubias had quoted to say that his detractors would turn his treasure into coals, and wise readers would turn the coals back into rubies.
An entry is far more than a definition. Folio 150 gives BRAÇO a Latin and a Greek etymology, its scriptural senses with chapter citations, an emblem from Claudio Paradino and an imperial coin cited from Gabriel Simeoni, the constitutional senses "braço Ecclesiastico" and "braço seglar" with the procedure by which a clergyman is handed to the secular arm, a proverb — "A dineros pagados, braços quebrados" — and a run of derived words from braçada to braçalete. The Tesoro is a dictionary that doubles as a repertory of proverbs, emblems and institutions.
The etymologies rest on a theological premise stated in the first paragraphs of the preface: that speech between Adam and Eve was "no adquirido, ni inuentado por ellos, sino infundido del Señor", and that the names Adam gave the animals "fueron los propios que les competian" because he knew their qualities. The knowledge of those first etymologies was lost after the flood "con la confusion de lenguas". Covarrubias is hunting the fragments of a language he believes was once exact, which is why the search is worth doing and also why it so often goes wrong.
Arabic is not treated as exotic. It turns up attached to workaday building and milling words in the ordinary run of the alphabet: the entry CABRIO, the thin pine batten used to roof a farmhouse, ends "En Arabigo se llama Alfargia", and CAZ, the millpond above the wheel, closes with "Algunos quieren sea Arabigo". This is what the credit to Diego de Urrea and the padre Guadix buys in practice.
American words are not there in the same way. At the opening where cacao would fall alphabetically — folio 166 verso of the Primera parte, where the column runs CABRIO, CACA, CACAREAR, CAZ, CAÇA — there is no CACAO entry: the Tesoro goes straight from the nursery word for excrement to the verb for a hen's cackling. On the evidence of this opening the American vocabulary had not been absorbed into a Castilian dictionary in 1611 the way the Arabic vocabulary had. The same column also confirms the preface's rule about spelling, since CAZ is filed before CAÇA rather than after it. This is a statement about one opening of the Primera parte only; the volume also carries a Segunda parte of seventy-nine folios, and the entries for canoa, huracan and tabaco, which fall elsewhere in the alphabet, were not opened.