The printed lexicography of Quechua, 1560-1754, as catalogued from outside Spain in 1858
For nearly two centuries the general language of Peru was treated in print as a working language: a Dominican lexicon at Valladolid in 1560, a two-volume vocabulary at Lima in 1607 and 1608, a Jesuit handbook printed at Seville in 1603 that reached a third edition in 1700 and another in 1754. The enumeration here is not Spanish self-report: it is the bibliography a London publisher finished in 1858 from a dead compiler's manuscript.
Why this wins its question: Ask what was printed of Quechua in the colonial period and the usual answer names Domingo de Santo Tomás in 1560 and stops, which leaves the impression of a single curiosity. Set out here instead is the whole printed line with imprints, formats and leaf counts - Valladolid 1560, Seville 1603, Lima 1604, 1607, 1608, 1614, 1619, 1700 and 1754 - including the fact that does the real work: one Jesuit handbook was corrected, enlarged and reissued across a hundred and fifty-one years, gaining a vocabulary of a second dialect on the way. The evidence is deliberately hostile-proof, being a bibliography compiled in New York and completed in London by people with no Spanish case to make, and it is used against itself where it fails: its date for González Holguín contradicts its own next line, and that is recorded rather than quietly fixed. The motive and the cost come from the same pages - catechisms bound into the grammars, an 1846 reprint declaring itself made for the service of the missions, and a compiler's preface saying the books had become exceedingly scarce.
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 catalogue used here is deliberately not a Spanish or Spanish-American one. It is The Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, by Hermann E. Ludewig, with additions and corrections by Wm. W. Turner, edited by Nicolas Trübner, London, 1858. Its editor states in his own advertisement that Ludewig died in December 1856 with no more than 172 pages printed off, that those pages are the only part of the work to have had the compiler's final revision, and that the additions for which the editor alone is responsible accumulated to about one sixth of the whole. The manuscript had been deposited in the library of the Ethnological Society of New York.
The Quichua section opens with a statement of extent that a bibliographer in London had no motive to inflate: the language of the Peruvians, spoken by all the tribes subject to the Incas from Pasto to the river Maule in Chile, "and is still in use. Many of the Spanish inhabitants speak it well and correctly." Aymara is noted as bearing a close affinity to it. Five dialects are distinguished - Cuzco, called the most cultivated; Lamano or Lamissa round Truxillo; Chinchaisuyu round Lima; Kalchaqui in Tucuman, rated the best after Cuzco; and that of Quito, called the least cultivated and corrupted by many foreign words.
The line of printed vocabularies begins with fray Domingo de Santo Tomás of the order of Santo Domingo: Lexicon ó Vocabulario de la lengua general del Peru llamada Quichua, Valladolid, printed by Francisco Fernández de Córdova, 1560, octavo, of eight and one hundred and seventy-nine leaves, with a further edition of 1586 noticed under the grammars. A dictionary of an American language was therefore set in type in Castile within thirty years of the invasion of Peru.
The largest of the vocabularies is credited to Diego González Holguín: Vocabulario de la Lengua general de todo el Peru llamada Quichua, o del Inca, with a reprint described as "Corregido e renovado conforme à la propiedad cortesana del Cuzco", printed in the Ciudad de los Reyes by Francisco del Canto in 1607 and 1608, two volumes in quarto of 375 and 332 pages, in two parts, Quichua-Spanish and Spanish-Quichua. The subtitle of the reprint is worth noticing: the standard being corrected to is the courtly usage of Cuzco, that is, an indigenous prestige dialect rather than a Spanish convenience.
The source is not reliable on dates and this object does not pretend otherwise. It gives 1586 for González Holguín's first printing, which sits badly with the 1607 and 1608 Lima volumes it lists immediately afterwards as the reprint of that work. The inconsistency is internal to the page and is recorded here rather than silently corrected, since no second source for the date was reachable from this container; the source's reliability is set below its tier for this reason.
One handbook was kept in service for a century and a half, which is the part of this story that a list of first editions hides. Diego de Torres Rubio of the Society of Jesus published Grammatica y Vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru, llamada Quichua y en la lengua Española at Seville in 1603, the grammar on forty leaves and the vocabulary in eleven sheets Quichua-Spanish and twelve Spanish-Quichua. It was reprinted at Lima by Francisco Lasso in 1619 as Arte de la Lengua Quichua, 103 leaves. A third edition, newly corrected, with the romances added, the small catechism corrected, the vocabulary enlarged and a further vocabulary of the Chinchaysuyu dialect supplied by Juan de Figueredo, was printed at Lima by Joseph de Contreras in 1700; another enlarged issue followed at Lima in 1754.
Two further Lima imprints appear in the same list: a Vocabulario en la Lengua general del Peru, llamada Quichua y en la Lengua Española by the maestro fray Juan Martínez, En los Reyes, 1604; and an Arte y Vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru, llamada Quichua, En los Reyes, Francisco del Canto, 1614, traced through the Bibliotheca Heberiana sale catalogues. Against these, the non-Iberian entries for Quichua on the same page are short and derivative: a vocabulary of two pages inside Joan de Laet's Novus Orbis, Leiden, Elzevir, 1633, a section of Gilij's Saggio di Storia Americana, and page references in Hervás.
The pattern is not peculiar to Quechua in this bibliography. Under the Araucans of Chile the primary documentation is again Iberian and Jesuit - Luis de Valdivia's Arte y Gramatica general de la Lengua que corre en todo el Reyno de Chile, con un Vocabulario en la Lengua de Chile, Lima, Francisco del Canto, 1606, and Andrés Febrés's Arte de la Lengua general del Reyno de Chile, Lima, 1765, of 682 pages - while the neighbouring entries by Hervás, Adelung's Mithridates, Balbi's Atlas Ethnographique, Marsden, D'Orbigny, Smith Barton and Horatio Hale for the United States Exploring Expedition are nineteenth-century comparative works standing on the earlier material. The claim is about who did the recording, not about who did it well, and confidence is held below 0.9 because two language sections are not a census.
The motive is on the record in the titles themselves and is not flattering to read as disinterested scholarship. Torres Rubio's third edition adds a corrected catechism; Febrés's Arte carries the Doctrina Christiana bound into it along with a Spanish-Chileno vocabulary; and the 1846 Santiago reprint of the Diccionario Chileno y Hispano states on its face that the edition was made for the service of the missions, under the inspection of a named missionary. These languages were kept in print for two centuries because conversion could not be done without them.
Printing did not mean surviving. Ludewig's own preface records that nearly all the Indian grammars and vocabularies are exceedingly scarce, that the greater part of the material is dispersed through books of voyages and travels, historical and geographical collections, documents and reports, and that these are generally found only in public libraries - which is why he thought a new inventory of the riches was wanted at all. The bibliography exists because the books had become hard to reach, and several of its entries survive only as lines in auction catalogues.