Matlatzinca (Pirinda) missionary philology — five described works, none printed
Five friars are recorded as having written grammars, dictionaries, sermons and catechisms in Matlatzinca; not one was printed. By 1862 only two of the bodies of work could be found, both in manuscript and one of them truncated, and the language itself survived in a single town. Beristáin records how the fullest of them was made: an Augustinian past sixty gathered the ablest Matlatzinca speakers and composed it with them.
Why this wins its question: Colonial missionary philology is almost always counted in printed books — the artes and vocabularios that survive because a press produced them in hundreds. Matlatzinca is the control case, and it is absent from the general accounts because it produced no imprint to be counted. This object assembles what is actually recorded: five named authors and their described works, the two that could still be found in 1862 and the state they were in, the sixteenth-century Franciscan at Tlatelolco who dated his sermons to 2 August 1562, and the bibliographer's sentence on how the fullest grammar was made — an Augustinian past sixty who gathered the ablest speakers and composed it with them. It also prints the point on which its two sources contradict each other, whether Pirinda names this language or Tarascan, rather than quietly choosing the tidier reading.
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 language was formerly spoken in the valley of Toluca; by the time Pimentel wrote in 1862 it was in use only at Charo, a place in the state of Michoacán. That contraction — from the population of a valley to one town — is the frame for everything else about its written record.
Pimentel gives two accounts of how the speakers came to be where they were. Clavijero, whom he quotes, has the matlatzincas forming a considerable state in the fertile valley of Toluca and, for all the old fame of their valour, subdued by the king Axayacatl to the crown of Mexico. Basalenque, whom he follows, has the matlatzincas of Charo coming out of Toluca to help the Michoacanos in a war and settling afterwards between Indaparapeo and Tiripitío, at the centre of the kingdom, whence they were called pirindas — or better pirintas, "los de en medio", the ones in the middle, in Tarascan.
Matlatzinco, Pimentel writes, is a Nahuatl word meaning "lugarcito de las redes", from matlat, net, and the diminutive particle tzinco; matlatzinca derives from it, and he argues that the etymology requires the words to be written with c — better k — and not with g as some authors do.
The written record is a list of five authors and none of them reached a press. Pimentel names an Arte y Sermones by Fr. Francisco Acosta; an Arte, Diccionario, Sermones, Catecismo y Manual de sacramentos by Fr. Diego Basalenque; Sermones by Fr. Gerónimo Bautista; an Arte, Vocabulario, Sermones y Catecismo by Fr. Andrés Castro; and an Arte, Vocabulario, Catecismo y Manual de sacramentos by Fr. Miguel Guevara. He gives the list as "las obras escritas en, ó sobre el matlatzinca, de que tengo noticia" — what he had notice of, not what existed.
Of those five bodies of work he could obtain two. Basalenque's Arte and Diccionario were preserved in manuscript in the museo nacional of Mexico; Guevara's Gramática, Catecismo and Manual survived in the original manuscript held by the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística. Guevara's Arte was "trunco", broken off, so that Pimentel could use only part of it, and he states the consequence himself: "siendo, por lo mismo, mi principal guia y maestro el P. Basalenque". The nineteenth-century description of the language rests on a seventeenth-century manuscript that was never printed.
Beristáin records how that manuscript was made, and the method is the point. Basalenque, elected provincial of the Augustinians of Michoacán in 1623, retired when already past sixty to the convent of Charo, where "con trabajo ímprobo y aplicación extraordinaria no solamente aprendió la dificil lengua Matlacinga hasta predicar en ella á los indios, sino que juntando á los mas habiles de estos, compuso Arte y Diccionario de la misma" — he gathered the ablest of the Matlatzinca speakers and composed the grammar and the dictionary with them. The friar is named as author; the informants are named as a group and not individually, which is the usual shape of the credit in these books.
Beristáin's own bibliography of Basalenque separates what was printed from what was not, and the proportion is the finding. In print: the Historia de la Provincia de S. Nicolás Tolentino de Michoacán, del Orden de S. Agustín, Mexico, Calderón, 1673. In manuscript, kept in the library of Charo and afterwards moved to Valladolid: an Arte de la Lengua Tarasca ó Pirinda, an Arte y vocabulario de la Lengua Matlacinga, Sermones in that language, and a Catecismo in it with a Manual de Párrocos de Michoacán — besides commentaries on most of the Old Testament and a long list of theological and legal treatises. The linguistic work of a man his own church honoured stayed unprinted while his provincial history was set in type twenty-two years after his death.
The two sources do not use the language names the same way, and the corpus does not resolve it. Beristáin's manuscript list has an "Arte de la Lengua Tarasca ó Pirinda" and a separate "Arte y vocabulario de la Lengua Matlacinga", and his notice says Basalenque knew "Latina, Italiana, Mégicana, Pirinda, Matlacinga, Griega y Hebrea" — three American languages, with Pirinda distinct from Matlacinga and apparently identified with Tarascan. Pimentel heads his chapter "El Matlatzinca ó Pirinda" and treats the two words as names for one language. An 1816 bibliographer and an 1862 comparatist using the same term for different things is itself the evidence about how little was settled.
One name on Pimentel's list is confirmed from the other side and dated. Beristáin's entry for BAUTISTA (Fr. Gerónimo) makes him a Franciscan of the province of the Santo Evangelio, resident at the Colegio de Tlatelolco in Mexico in the year 1562, who on 2 August of that year finished writing his Sermones en Lengua Matlacinga. The work in the language therefore begins in the sixteenth century and in the college where Nahua students were taught Latin, not with the Augustinians of Michoacán a lifetime later.
Basalenque died at the age of seventy-four on 12 December 1651, having spent the last years of his life on this work. Beristáin's notice closes with matter this corpus does not use — the two epitaphs, the visits of the prelates at his deathbed, the body found incorrupt a year after burial — and the object cites him only for the bibliography, the dates and the sentence on how the grammar was composed.
Neither manuscript was reachable from this container, and neither source read it as a whole: Pimentel had Basalenque's Arte and Diccionario in his hands and describes the language from them, while Beristáin lists them at a distance of a century and a half. What is registered here is a record of works, not the works. The tier is set accordingly.