Andrés de Olmos, Arte de la lengua mexicana (1547)
The grammar of Nahuatl that a Franciscan finished in 1547 at the convent of Hueytlalpan, twenty-five years before the oldest Nahuatl grammar that reached print. It stayed in manuscript for 328 years — no press, a dead printer, a dead patron — and was published at last in Paris in 1875 from two surviving copies. Its author says on the first page why he wrote it: charity, his prelate's order, and the salvation of the souls of "estos naturales indios".
Why this wins its question: Olmos is normally a footnote to Molina — "an earlier grammar, lost or unpublished" — and the 1875 Paris edition that makes him readable is almost never opened. It is opened here. The object quotes Olmos's own statement of purpose from his prologue, the anonymous Franciscan prologue that names who ordered the book and why it never reached a press, and the editor's account of the two manuscripts the printed text rests on. The same pages supply the counterweights: Torquemada's naming of two earlier grammarians, so the priority claim is bounded; and Siméon's note that the Nahua speeches Olmos collected carry Christian thoughts he added to them.
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 work reached print as "GRAMMAIRE DE LA LANGUE NAHUATL OU MEXICAINE, COMPOSÉE, EN 1547, PAR LE FRANCISCAIN ANDRÉ DE OLMOS, ET PUBLIÉE AVEC NOTES, ÉCLAIRCISSEMENTS, ETC. PAR RÉMI SIMÉON", at Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1875 — three hundred and twenty-eight years after it was composed.
Siméon's introduction places the edition in the programme of the Commission scientifique du Mexique, attached to the ministry of public instruction and running from 1864 to 1868, which was charged with publishing original works and documents on Mexico and Central America and whose labours were cut short by political events.
Olmos composed the grammar while he was Franciscan superior of the convent established at Hueytlalpan, a town in the mountains some forty to fifty leagues north-east of Mexico City; he was then about fifty-five and had lived in Mexico for twenty years, so the book rests on two decades of daily practice rather than on a survey.
On Siméon's reckoning the Arte, finished in 1547, preceded by twenty-five years the grammar of Alonso de Molina, "la plus ancienne de toutes celles qui ont été imprimées"; Olmos therefore "ouvrit et prépara la voie des études grammaticales en langue nahuatl", and his manuscript served the grammarians and lexicographers who came after him, "car ils ont souvent donné les mêmes règles et les mêmes exemples".
Priority is not clean, and the same page says so. Torquemada named two Spaniards, Francisco Ximénez and Alonso Rengel, as the first grammarians in the language, and only then cited Olmos as "el que sobre todos tuvo don de lenguas", author in Mexican of "el arte mas copioso y provechoso de los que se han hecho", of a vocabulario, and of comparable work in Totonac and in Huastec. Olmos's is the first Nahuatl grammar that survives, not demonstrably the first written.
The author states his own motive in the first sentence of his prologue, and it is religious: "Dos cosas, muy amado lector, me compelieron a poner mano en esta pequeña obra: que fueron la caridad y obediencia de mi prelado", the end being the glory and honour of Christ "y salud de las almas destos naturales indios". He describes the book modestly as opening "si quiera, una senda" — at least a path — which whoever is served to give it more light may make into a road.
A second, anonymous prologue by a lettered Franciscan records that the work was commissioned: the making of the book was entrusted and commanded to Olmos by "el Reuerendo padre fray Martin de Hojacastro, que entonces era comissario general en aquellas partes y despues sucedio en obispo de Tlaxcala", who called in "otros muy essenciales frailes de la mesma orden" for the decision. The grammar was an order of the province, not a private undertaking.
The same prologue explains the silence that followed. The finished book was left unprinted "por la falta de inprentas que ay alla" and the death of the printer at that juncture; fray Francisco de Bustamante afterwards carried to Spain "esta arte y un bocabulario de la mesma lengua escripto por otro padre de nuestra sagrada religion" in order to have them printed, and died while his business was still pending — "cuya muerte fue causa para que la inpression de los dichos libros no se solicitasse".
Siméon dates that failure to 1562 and draws the bibliographic consequence: no edition of Olmos's grammatical treatise can have been given at Mexico in 1555, as a passage of Francisco Pimentel's Cuadro descriptivo y comparativo de las lenguas indígenas de México would suggest, and the Arte is therefore published in 1875 as a work entirely unpublished.
What is printed is an editor's text, not an autograph. Siméon established it from two manuscripts — one in the Bibliothèque nationale, fonds espagnol no 259, formerly no 8172, bought by Colbert about 1665 for the king's library, and one belonging to the Paris publisher Maisonneuve. He records a further copy at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and one held by Aubin, said to have belonged successively to Las Casas and to Torquemada, which he was not given sight of.
Olmos taught Latin at the college of Santa Cruz in Mexico, in the chair first occupied by the Frenchman Arnaud de Bassace, and wrote in Nahuatl an Arte, a Vocabulario, El juicio final, the Pláticas que los señores mexicanos hacian a sus hijos, a Libro de los siete sermones, and treatises on the seven mortal sins, the sacraments and sacrilege. He died at Tampico on 8 October 1571.
The transmission of Nahua material through him is not neutral, and the edition says so. The Pláticas printed alongside the grammar are the speeches Nahua lords made to their children, collected by Olmos; Siméon notes that to this piece of Nahuatl literature "le pieux franciscain a parfois ajouté des pensées chrétiennes", and that a short declaración in Spanish follows it. The speeches survive with their collector's additions inside them.