Domingo de Santo Tomás, Grammatica o arte de la lengua general del Perú (1560)
The first grammar of Quechua, finished at Valladolid in January 1560 by a Dominican who had spent fifteen years in Peru. Its prologue to Philip II turns the grammar itself into evidence: a tongue this ordered cannot be called barbarous, therefore its speakers are not barbarians, therefore the men telling the king they may be treated worse than his other vassals are lying to him out of private interest.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of this book records that a Dominican published the first Quechua grammar in 1560 and stops there, so the argument the book was written to make disappears. The argument is what is quoted here, from the sheets: the inference from the regularity of the language to the rationality of its speakers, and the charge - made in print, to the king, by a friar who had lived fifteen years in Peru - that the men saying otherwise were lying for their own profit. The same pages carry what a one-sided account would leave out: the missionary purpose the author states first, the paternalism of "gente mas flaca y mas nueva", the appeal to royal revenue set beside the appeal to justice, and the fact that the codified "lengua general" was itself an imperial tongue spread by Huayna Capac over other languages.
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 book was printed at Valladolid by Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, printer to the royal household, and its colophon dates the finished printing to ten days of the month of January in the year 1560. The title page carries the royal arms and the words "CON PRIVILEGIO"; the summary of that privilege grants ten years in which nobody in these kingdoms or in the Indies of the Mar Occeano may print the Arte or the Vocabulario without the author's express licence.
The work names its subject on its first text page - "Comiença el arte de la lengua general del Peru, llamada, Quichua" - which is among the earliest printed uses of the word as the name of the language.
The author states the basis of the work in his own prologue: in fifteen continuous years spent in the great kingdoms of Peru he had come to know their general language, and he judged it would deserve reproach, like the bad servant, to have hidden the talent he received from his lord. The grammar rests on fifteen years of residence, not on a survey.
He declares the purpose of the book to the king in one sentence. His principal intent in offering "este Artezillo", he writes, has been so that by it Philip II may see "muy clara y manifiestamente, quan falso es lo que muchos os han querido persuadir, ser los naturales delos reynos del Peru barbaros, & indignos de ser tractados con la suavidad y libertad que los demas vassallos vuestros lo son".
The argument runs from the grammar to the grammarians. The language has abundance of vocabulary, agreement between words and the things they signify, varied and curious manners of speaking, a sweet sound, and the order and property of declension, moods, tenses and persons of the verb; being regulated and enclosed under the rules and precepts of Latin, as the Arte itself shows, it cannot be called barbarous - full of barbarisms and defects, without moods, tenses, cases, order, rule or concert - but polished and delicate.
From that he draws the inference the book exists to make: if the language is so, then the people who use it are not to be counted among the barbarous but among those of much polity, because nothing shows a man's intelligence more than the speech he uses, which is the offspring of the concepts of the understanding. He tells the king plainly that the naturales of those kingdoms are people of very great polity and order, and that those who tell him otherwise mean to deceive him, "teniendo atención a solos sus proprios y particulares intereses".
The same prologue records how the language was spread before the Spanish arrived: it was the tongue used generally by all the lords and principal men of the land and by a great part of the common people, over the dominion of "aquel gran señor llamado Guaynacapa", which the author reckons at more than a thousand leagues in length and more than a hundred across. The "lengua general" the grammar codifies was already an imperial lingua franca laid over other tongues.
The motive is missionary and the book says so. The author writes that many friars did not undertake the apostolic work of preaching the Gospel to the Indians because of the difficulty of learning the language, and that seeing it reduced to an Arte they would take heart and learn it easily; he did not trust his own judgement in this until he presented the work to the Consejo Real de Indias, which had it examined, understood that printing it would be of much utility for those kingdoms, and ordered it printed. The volume ends with a "Platica para todos los Indios", a sermon in Quechua printed with an interlinear Spanish gloss above the line.
The defence is not an argument for equality of standing, and reading the close of the prologue is what shows it. He asks that they be received under the king's protection like his other vassals and treated as capable of the same treatment, but with greater favour, "pues es gente mas flaca y mas nueva en vuestro servicio, y enel yugo de Christo nuestro señor" - and he presses the case with an appeal to interest as well as to justice: if the king does not act, the greater part of that world will shortly be depopulated, in which the king will lose his revenue and his vassals, and God their souls.
The first chapter, on orthography, states the condition the whole book works from: the Indians and naturales of that land used no writing and had no memory of any among them, so they had no letters or characters with which to set down their concepts and antiquities, using instead a new and ingenious manner of certain counts and signs. The language is therefore to be written throughout with Spanish letters. What the grammar preserves, it preserves in the script of the people who wrote it down.