The Noceda–Sanlúcar Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (Manila, licensed 1753–54)
The Jesuit dictionary of Tagalog, licensed at Manila in 1753 and 1754 and reprinted at Valladolid in 1832 and Manila in 1860. Its prologue states the evidentiary rule the work was built on: Juan de Noceda spent thirty years checking roots word by word and would not fix the meaning of one until twelve fluent Tagalog speakers agreed on its pronunciation, accent and sense — and it states, on the same pages, that the whole apparatus exists for the parish priests of "nuestros indios tagalos".
Why this wins its question: Reference coverage of this dictionary is bibliographic — Noceda and Sanlúcar, Tagalog, 1754, three editions — and stops there. What the prologue actually contains is a stated evidentiary standard that no summary reports: a thirty-year verification in which no root was recorded until twelve fluent Tagalog speakers agreed on its pronunciation, accent and meaning, with the compiler refusing to settle for nine. This object quotes that rule from the sheets, together with the chain of five earlier compilers the same pages name, the count of thirty-seven Tagalog grammars already read by 1753, and the aprobación that calls the book an instrument for the curas of "nuestros indios tagalos" — the achievement and the purpose taken from the same prologue, so that neither can be cited 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 of the Manila 1860 printing reads "VOCABULARIO DE LA LENGUA TAGALA, compuesto por varios religiosos doctos y graves, y coordinado por el P. Juan de Noceda y el P. Pedro de Sanlucar, ultimamente aumentado y corregido por varios religiosos de la Orden de Agustinos calzados", imprinted "REIMPRESO EN MANILA. IMPRENTA DE RAMIREZ Y GIRAUDIER. 1860". The book announces itself as collective and as a reprint: no single author, and an editorial layer added by a different religious order from the one that compiled it.
The licences bound into the volume date the original publication and name the authorities that cleared it. Fr. Blas de Plasencia signed his aprobación at the Convento de San Martín de Bocaue on 19 October 1753; Governor and Captain General Francisco José de Obando, Marqués de Obando, granted the licencia del gobierno by decree of 6 November 1753, having seen the aprobación of the Augustinian visitador Fr. Juan Serrano; and Archbishop Pedro de la Santísima Trinidad Martínez y Arizala issued the licencia del ordinario at the Palacio Arzobispal de Manila on 1 January 1754, permitting the printing "en cualquiera de las imprentas de esta ciudad".
The prologue records the rule that governed the work, and it is a rule about whose testimony counts. Noceda "treinta años estuvo averiguando palabra por palabra", having set himself as an infallible rule "el que no pasaría de una á otra sin que conviniesen doce indios ladinos en este idioma en la pronunciacion, acento y significacion de cada raiz". Pressed once to record a root on which nine speakers already agreed, he refused: unless such things are done with singular application, he answered, a man content with nine today will be content with seven the next day and with four the day after — "y daremos en el inconveniente de contentarnos con cualquiera cosa, apuntando lo que con el tiempo conoceremos que no nos puede servir". The dictionary is thus, by its own account, an edifice of Tagalog testimony — none of the twelve is ever named.
The same prologue prints the descent of the work through five generations of compilers. The thesaurus method — printing each root with the plays of its affixes rather than as a bare gloss — was devised by Fr. Francisco de San José, of the Dominicans, who began but could not continue it; Fr. Miguel Ruiz carried it through the letters A, B, C, D; Fr. Tomás de los Reyes brought it "en perfeccion hasta las letras M, N, Ng, O"; and the Jesuits Pablo Clain, Francisco Jansens and José Hernández "no solo concluyeron toda la obra, sino que añadieron cerca de cuatro mil raices con sus juegos respectivos". The prologuist gives the names so "que no se sepulten en el olvido unos hombres tan acreedores de nuestro recuerdo".
The prologue also supplies a count that measures the scale of Philippine philology by the middle of the eighteenth century: of the artes, or grammars, of Tagalog, "treinta y siete he leido; los once de mi sagrada Religion, y los demás de las otras sagradas Religiones, entrando en el mismo número tres de otros tantos Señores celosos Clérigos", and the writer does not doubt there were more he never saw. He adds the comparison that this one language "ella sola escede en el número … al número de artes que habrá para las lenguas vivas y muertas de toda Europa". The count is a participant's self-report and the European comparison is rhetorical, so both are carried at reduced confidence.
On accent the Jesuit compiler defers explicitly to a Franciscan and a secular author: "Los PP. Fr. Domingo de los Santos, franciscano, y Pedro Lope … ponen cuatro, á quienes sigo, y he seguido en este Vocabulario acerca de sus acentos." Four accents are then notated — penúltima producta grave (pp.), penúltima producta pausal (pp.'), penúltima correpta grave (pc.), penúltima correpta gutural (pc.') — the guttural one described as pronounced "recalcadamente hàcia la garganta … y antes de llegar à ella detener con sutileza el aliento". The example given is baga, which "tiene tantos acentos como letras, y tantas significaciones como acentos": brasa, bofes, por ventura, postema.
The dictionary is not a word list but a paradigm book. Under each root the prologue explains that the "juego de las raices" is printed in abbreviated form: which active the root takes (Vm or Mag), which passive marks the thing (In), the place (An) or the instrument (Y), and how the frequentative (Mapan-), the completed action (Naga-), the plural (Magcaca-) and the social forms (Maqui-, Maquipag-) are built from it. The first page of the body shows the practice — "ABAT. pp. Salir al camino. Vm, el que sale. In, al que sale. Frecuent. Manaabat, Salteador" — with example sentences in Tagalog and metaphorical senses marked.
The purpose is stated in the book, not inferred. Plasencia's aprobación calls the Vocabulario "libro de oro para los Ministros y Curas de nuestros indios tagalos", "necesarísimo para hacerse maestro en el idioma", and places it under the Jesuit fourth vow, "en la salvacion de las almas … en la conversion de los infieles". The prologue says the language is "cultivada de sus naturales y de los Ministros, que la aprenden con solo el fin de emplearse en el bien de estos desdichados indios", and closes its discussion of dialect by calling the whole labour worthwhile for a motive "tan soberano, como es glorificar á Dios en la conversion de las almas". The instrument of description and the instrument of conversion are the same object.
The book also records its own limits. The prologue warns that a reader may find a word no speaker recognises, because "no se acierta á preguntar, ó no acierte el indio á responder", and because "la nacion tagala se compone ya del Comintang, ya de los tingues, ya de los tagalos de Corte, y no es posible concordar las voces de los montes con las de los valles". The accent rules are given as "casi generales" with their exceptions listed, and the writer complains that the diacritics themselves are unreliable in print — "las virgulillas en este libro unas son asi ´, otras asi `: esto ha nacido de los impresores, que jamàs atinaron con esta diferencia".
Plasencia's aprobación credits the work with "mas de tres mil términos ó voces que hasta ahora no se hallan en vocabularios que tratan de este idioma". The figure comes from a censor writing in praise of a colleague's book and is not independently checked here, so it is reported as the claim of the aprobación rather than as a measured count.