Pedro Marbán, Arte de la lengua moxa (Lima, licensed December 1701)
The first printed description of an Amazonian language of the Bolivian lowlands, licensed at Lima in December 1701 and printed there with a vocabulary, a catechism and a confessionary bound in. Its opening chapter records what Latin grammar could not hold: a sound system missing four Spanish letters, an aspiration that distinguishes words, nouns with no gender and no case, and possession carried by prefixes that the grammarian describes exactly and then apologises for.
Why this wins its question: Marbán's Arte is normally a catalogue line — "first grammar of Moxo, Lima 1701/1702" — with the date itself unsettled and nothing quoted from inside. The volume is opened here and the disagreement is resolved from the evidence: the three licences bound into the book are dated Lima, 15, 16 and 17 December 1701, and the title page carries no legible year. More to the point, the grammar is read as a grammar. What comes out is a seventeenth-century description of an Arawakan language that names the missing consonants, isolates an aspiration contrast with a minimal pair, states plainly that the nouns have no gender and the language no true declension, and glosses the possessive prefixes literally because the Latin case frame could not carry them. The book's own hierarchy of "political" over "barbarous" languages, and its description of itself as a weapon for declaring war on the Devil, are quoted from the same pages.
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 "ARTE DE LA LENGVA MOXA, CON SU VOCABULARIO, Y CATHECISMO. COMPUESTO POR EL M. R. P. PEDRO MARBAN de la Compañia de Jesvs, Superior, que fue, de las Missiones de Infieles, que tiene la Compañia de esta Provincia de el Perù en las dilatadas Regiones de los Indios Moxos, y Chiquitos", dedicated to the viceroy Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, conde de la Monclova, and printed "En la Imprenta Real de Joseph de Contreras". The left edge and foot of this leaf are cropped in the digitisation read and no year is legible on the title page itself.
The book is dated by the three licences bound into it, all of December 1701 and all issued at Lima: Antonio Garriga's approbation from the Colegio Máximo de San Pablo on the 16th; the ordinary's licence "dada en los Reyes en 17. de Diziembre de 1701", signed by order of the provisor by Juan Manuel del Molino; and, on the 15th, the licence of Diego Francisco Altamirano, visitor and vice-provincial of the Society in the Province of Peru. Catalogue records commonly give the imprint year as 1702; the dated evidence inside the volume is the 1701 licence chain.
Altamirano's licence itemises what was being printed, and it is a working kit rather than a grammar alone: "el Arte, y Vocabulario, Catechismo mayor, y menor Oraciones; Confesionario y practica de administrar los Santos Sacramentos, que compuso en lengua Moxa el P. Pedro Marban de nuestra Compañia". Garriga's approbation ends by judging that a work so useful to "la conservacion, y augmento de aquella nueva Christiandad" not only may but "se debe imprimir".
Chapter I, "Del Accento, y Declinacion", opens with a phonological description. The language, like many others the author calls barbarous, does not have all the letters of "las lenguas politicas": it lacks D, F, G and L; the R is never doubled or pronounced harshly "sino con suavidad, y sencilla"; and two consonants together "no se hallan en esta lengua, sino rarissima vez". Accent in verbs falls almost always on the last syllable and rarely on the penultimate; in nouns it varies, some on the last, some on the penultimate, few on the antepenultimate.
The same page isolates a phonemic contrast and warns that the word will be mistaken if it is missed. The language uses H heavily, "y quando es aspiracion, la pronuncia el Indio con tanta fuerza, que parece G", so that care must be taken to pronounce it "como la lengua lo pide; porque sino, no se entenderá bien el vocablo"; the example given is a minimal pair in which the form with aspiration means to suckle and the form without it means to throw up food or drink.
Where the Latin frame fails, the book says so instead of forcing it. Nouns are substantive or adjective and are told apart only by their meaning, "porque en ellos no ay variedad de generos, como en otras lenguas"; and "No ay en esta lengua rigorosa declinacion; porque no se halla particula rigorosa, que distinga los casos vnos de otros", the cases being supplied for the most part by the possessive pronouns. The nominative needs no particle at all: "Achane, el hombre: Esseno, la muger, Ehoiro, el varon."
The genitive is then described as a possessive construction, with the analysis spelled out. It "se haze con el Posesivo, y la cosa poseida: v.g. mamuiria ehoiro, el vestido del varon: sumuiria esseno: el vestido de la muger: taibope ichini, el pie del Tigre", the only particles distinguishing genitive from nominative being ma, su and ta, "que son los Posesivos de essas cosas; y en rigor, quiere dezir, su vestido varon, su vestido muger, su pie Tigre." A grammarian trained on Latin has recorded a set of possessive prefixes that vary with the class of the possessor, and has given the literal gloss that shows what he could not fit into a case paradigm.
The purpose is stated in the book's own terms and they are terms of conquest. The missionaries, having mastered "la intratable dificultad del Barbaro idioma", began to wield "como armas proprias las vozes agenas, có que declarar guerra al Demonio, y disipar las tinieblas de su antigua ceguedad". The dedication also distinguishes this work from grammars of "las Naciones politicas", which facilitate "la expresion de los conceptos; inteligencia de los negocios, y expedicion de sus comercios" — the hierarchy between "political" and "barbarous" languages is the author's own, printed on his own page.
The same passage gives the reason such books were printed at all, and it is an argument about cumulative labour rather than about scholarship: the first work of understanding the language once done, it "sirve aora de facilidad a los nuevos Ministros del Evangelio, que entran vnos a gozar el fruto del trabajo de los otros", quoting John — "Alij laboraverunt, et vos in labores eorum introistis". A printed grammar meant the next missionary did not start from nothing; it is also why the record survived the mission that made it.