Montoya's Guaraní corpus — Tesoro, Arte, Bocabulario and Catecismo (Madrid, 1639–1640)
The four books with which Antonio Ruiz de Montoya fixed Guaraní in print: a grammar, a Spanish-to-Guaraní vocabulary, an 800-page Tesoro running the other way, and a catechism, all examined by the Council of the Indies and printed at Madrid in 1639 and 1640. They gave the language an orthography for sounds Castilian does not have — a mark for nasal vowels, another for guttural ones — and were reissued unaltered at Leipzig in 1876. Guaraní is today a co-official language of Paraguay.
Why this wins its question: Montoya's Guaraní books are normally cited as a name and a date, or folded into a sentence about Jesuit linguistics. The concrete content is what is missing: which four books there were, who examined them and when, what collation each carries, and above all the analytical decisions — a mark invented for nasal vowels, a declension by particles instead of endings, a plural with no marker of its own. Those are here from a descriptive bibliography that transcribes the title pages and quotes the prologues, set beside the royal approbation printed in Montoya's own other book, and beside his own account of the coercion the mission economy ran on.
Key takeaways
- Guaraní was described, standardised and printed in four royally examined volumes between 1639 and 1640 by a missionary who had spent decades speaking it.
- The orthography was designed for the language, not borrowed from Castilian — a mark for nasal vowels, another for guttural ones, and a declension by particles rather than endings.
- The books were made to convert and instruct; the description of the language is a by-product of that purpose, and the prologues say so.
- Their afterlife is unusual for a missionary grammar: reprinted whole and unaltered at Leipzig in 1876, with the plates ending up in Rio de Janeiro.
- Guaraní is today spoken by a majority in Paraguay and co-official there, which is why a seventeenth-century orthography still matters.
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 four books were examined for the Crown before they were printed. The aprobacion in Montoya's Conquista espiritual records that its examiner had earlier been ordered by the Real y Supremo Consejo to see "los libros del Tesoro, Arte, Vocabulario, y Catecismo de la lengua Guarani del Paraguay, que hizo el Reuerendo Padre Antonio Ruiz de Motoya, de la Compañia de Iesus", and that he approved them on the strength of his own experience of the provinces of Peru, of their languages, and of Buenos Aires and the Río de la Plata.
Montoya described the set himself, in words the standard bibliography quotes from the Tesoro: "Tres cuerpos ofrezco impresos. El primero es un Arte y Bocabulario en un tomo. El segundo intitulé Tesoro, porque procuré vestirle con algo su riqueza… El tercero es su Catecismo, que será de alguna ayuda á los que tienen obligación de enseñar, donde hallarán materia para las ordinarias doctrinas."
The grammar and dictionary volume was printed at Madrid by Iuan Sanchez in 1640 as "Arte, y Bocabulario de la lengua guarani. Compuesto por el Padre Antonio Ruiz, de la Compañia de Iesus", a quarto of five preliminary leaves plus 376 and 234 pages. Its privilege for ten years is dated Madrid 25 March 1639, the ordinary's licence 14 February 1639 and the tassa 5 December 1639; it carries approbations from Diego de Boroa, Jesuit provincial of Paraguay, and Gabriel de Peralta, canon of Buenos Aires, both signed there on 4 October 1637, and from Lorenzo Hurtado de Mendoza, bishop-elect of Rio de Janeiro, at Madrid on 7 March 1639.
The catechism followed from a different Madrid house the same year: "Catecismo de la Lengua Guarani, compuesto por el Padre Antonio Ruyz de la Compañia de Iesus", printed by Diego Diaz de la Carrera in 1640, an octavo of 336 pages and seven preliminary leaves, with an approbation by the Paraguay provincial dated Buenos Aires 4 October 1637 and a dedication to the Virgin in Latin.
The grammar's first technical problem was that Guaraní has pronunciations Castilian has no letters for, and Montoya answered it with diacritics. He sets out four: "La primera pronunciacion es narigal, que se forma en la nariz, cuya nota es esta ∧, puesta sobre la vocal que se ha de pronunciar con la nariz"; a second guttural, formed in the throat, marked ∨; a third that is both at once, marked with a tilde; and a fourth guttural formed with contraction. Written Guaraní still marks nasality.
He also declined to force the language into the Latin frame wholesale. The nouns are given a declension by particles rather than by endings — "Abaré" the priest, "Abarambaé" the priest's thing, "abaré upé" to the priest — and he states that the plural has no marks distinct from the singular, the particle "Hetá", meaning many, being used instead. The verbs he divides into active, passive, neuter and absolute, all conjugated with seven notas, three singular and four plural.
The purpose was ministry, and the books say so: the catechism is offered as help to those under obligation to teach, and the whole set was approved on the ground of the conversion work it would serve. The corpus is an instrument of evangelisation that happens to be, as a by-product, the first full description of the language.
Not everything he wrote in the language reached print. The bibliography registers "Sermones de las Dominicas del Año y fiestas de los Indios, en lengua tupi" by Montoya under 1639, on the strength of a mention in the introduction to the Tesoro, and records that the author himself said he never published it.
The corpus was still being reprinted in full more than two centuries later. Julio Platzmann republished the Arte, Bocabulario, Tesoro and Catecismo at Leipzig in 1876, "sin alteración alguna", in four volumes running to roughly 220, 500, 800 and 350 pages; a separate Paris edition of the Vocabulario and Tesoro appeared the same year. Platzmann gave the stereotype plates of his edition to the Brazilian government, and they were kept at the Biblioteca Nacional of Rio de Janeiro.
The same author's other book shows what the language work was embedded in. The missions where these books were used were labour communities under pressure from slave raiders and from Spanish tribute demands, and Montoya's own account of them records thousands of deaths in the yerba trade and encomenderos taking six months a year of unpaid service. A linguistic achievement and a coercive setting are documented by one witness.