Carlos de Tapia Zenteno, Noticia de la lengua huasteca (Mexico, 1767)
The only printed grammar, catechism and dictionary of Huastec to come out of colonial Mexico, and a book that dates its own delay: written more than forty years before it appeared, licensed more than twenty, held back by what printing cost until an archbishop paid. It describes four sibilants by where the tongue goes, records a dialect split around Tampico, and ends in confession questions written for native officials about beating people for tribute.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of colonial Mexican linguistics run on Nahuatl, and Huastec - a Mayan language stranded a thousand kilometres from the rest of its family - is usually a footnote naming Tapia Zenteno and a date. This object quotes the 1767 sheets instead: the articulatory descriptions of z, tz and x; the tz-for-ch dialect boundary at Tamtoyoc and Tamtima with the minimal pair Txic against Chic; the twenty-two letters and five diphthongs; the botanical tail of the dictionary. It puts the costs beside them from the same front matter, without importing a critic - a manuscript held back more than twenty years by the price of printing until an archbishop paid, a 1570 catechism voided by a council in 1585 and replaced by a 1689 reprint its own readers could not decipher, a description of a living dialect written down as an affectation, and a confession manual that asks native officials whether they beat people and pawned their metates to collect the tribute. Nothing else in reach states both halves from the leaves.
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 reads "NOTICIA DE LA LENGUA HUASTECA, QUE EN BENEFICIO DE SUS NACIONALES, DE ORDEN DEL ILmô. Sr. ARZOPISPO de esta Santa Iglesia Metropolitana, Y A SUS EXPENSAS, DA CARLOS DE TAPIA ZENTENO, Cura, que fuè de la Iglesia Parrochial de Tampamolon, Juez Eclesiastico de la Villa de los Valles, Commissario del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion, Cathedratico de Prima de Lengua Mexicana en esta Real Universidad, y el primero en el Real, y Pontificio Colegio Seminario, Examinador Synodal de este Arzobispado, y Capellan Mayor del Monasterio de Santa Inès. CON CATHECISMO, Y DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA para su instruccion, segun lo que ordena el Santo Concilio Mexicano, Enchiridion Sacramental para su administracion, con todo lo que parece necessario hablar en ella los Neoministros, y copioso Diccionario para facilitar su inteligencia. CON LICENCIA DE LOS SUPERIORES: En Mexico, en la Imprenta de la Bibliotheca Mexicana. En el Puente del Espiritu-Santo, año de 1767." The misspelling "ARZOPISPO" is on the sheet, not introduced here.
The book dates its own delay, in the author's address "Al estudiante aplicado". He had written the paper more than forty years earlier for his own teaching; the licences for its printing had been issued in various curias more than twenty years before, as their dates show; and the printing "por sus costos se ha detenido" until Archbishop Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, five months into his tenure, ordered it printed at his own expense. One of the printed approvals, by Br. Matheo de Herrera, cura of Yahualican, is dated 18 October 1746 - twenty-one years before the imprint - and calls the work an "Arte de Lengua Huasteca".
Two parts of the original manuscript were cut to keep the volume small, and the author says which. The first draft carried "un Paradigma apologetico, dando razon del motivo de esta Obra, y una Descripcion geographica de aquella Region, para quitar el terrorpanico, que sin haverla visto, han aprehendido algunos" - a geography written to answer the fear the Huasteca inspired in people who had never been there. Both were dropped "por no abultar à volumen este Tratado".
The same address records what the book replaced, and the record is a loss as much as a gain. An older Huastec cartilla, he says, was written in 1570, during the vacancy left by Alonso de Montufar, second prelate of the diocese; the Mexican Provincial Council met in October 1585, fifteen years and one month after it, and prohibited under pain of excommunication the use of all doctrinas printed before its own celebration; another cartilla was printed in 1689 but is only a copy of the first, reduced to fourteen leaves, with so many press errors that it is "imperceptible, aun à los mesmos Indios", and even so hard to obtain. He notes that the Indians still practise the old cartilla by tradition and that its paraphrastic additions must now be avoided.
The legal ground for printing in Huastec at all is quoted from the two councils that bound the clergy: preaching must be "Etiam linguas vernaculas" by Trent and "Indis vero propria materna" by the Mexican council. The author draws a working rule from it - speak with the most attentive reflection and introduce no "voces peregrinas", however explanatory they look - and backs it with the case of Fr. Martin de Leon, the great master of Nahuatl, who would not publish the word Teotlacatl for "Persona Divina" without public consultation and testimony. To do otherwise is "dàr veneno por theriaca".
The phonology is done by articulation, not by analogy. The four principal pronunciations of the language are z, tz, x and ch. The z is pronounced "con todo rigor, con la lengua algo fuera de los dientes, pegada à ellos", found initially, medially and finally without difference, as in Zipaç, Zamzul, Tuz, Iziz. The tz is made "cerrando los dientes, y difundiendo por todos ellos la lengua, formando un sybilo sin violencia", and every perfect and imperfect preterite in the language ends in tz - "yo iba, Incalelitz. Yo fui, Incalleitz." The x is "algo apartados los dientes, sin llegar à ellos la lengua, y assentandola en lo inferior de la boca, bien abiertos los labios", as in xiil, tzaxlab, tzux.
A dialect boundary is described in 1767, with a minimal pair to prove it. The beginner is warned not to stumble on the speech of Tamtoyoc and most of the jurisdiction of Tampico, Panuco excepted, and above all the "Serranos de Tamtima", who use ch where the standard he teaches has tz: for sweet, "decimos Txic; y ellos dicen Chic, que significa univocamente el orin". The description is precise and the judgement on it is not neutral - he says they pronounce it "como nosotros en Castellano, y afectando un remilgo", make the language "confusissimo" and fill it with equivocations. A variety is recorded and graded as an error in the same paragraph.
The alphabet is counted and the gaps named: the letters "como se expressan en el Alphabeto, son veinte y dos", from which five necessary diphthongs are formed - ae as in que, au as in tyaub, ei as in yei, eu as in belleuh, and a fifth; and the language has neither ll nor ff. The author also warns that final m and n must be pronounced and heard with rigour, because in nouns ending in those letters the meaning is commonly known only from what precedes or follows.
The lexicon was scoped for a beginner and includes a botany. The author says he closed the dictionary "con los Nombres proprios à Arboles, Plantas, Flores, &c. muy medicinales, de que abunda mucho esta tierra", judging that the necessary minimum for someone starting out, without turning his pen to anything else.
The confession manual carries a section addressed to indigenous officials, and it is the most concrete evidence in the book about what tribute collection looked like. After the eighth commandment the heading reads "Los Mandones regularmente suelen tener estas culpas", and the questions, printed in Spanish and Huastec in facing columns, are: "Para cobrar los Tributos, ò las Obvenciones, has maltratado à los pobres hijos?" and "Les has quitado en prendas sus metates, ò machetes, ò lo que tienen?" A pastoral instrument written by a Spanish priest puts the beating of tributaries and the seizure of their grinding stones and machetes on a printed page as sins to be confessed by the native authorities who did them.
The same pages preserve ethnographic detail the author had no doctrinal reason to keep. He notes that "las injurias mas sensibles para ellos, y ellas, que comunmente se dicen en las riñas, son: Coquix, Penenhualle, Cubathualle Quæ", and refers the reader to the dictionary for them.
His treatment of interjections shows both the limit of his framework and what slipped through it. He doubts the interjection is a part of speech at all, dismisses it as those "signos mudos, comunes aun à los Brutos", and says he therefore has no particular obligation to give notice of it - and then records that he has heard one voice used only by women, who to show disgust or distaste at what they see or hear say, "con melindre", Ixtètè. A gendered speech form is preserved in the middle of an argument that the category deserves no attention.
The author's own estimate of the book is lower than its reputation, and the vocabulary he uses for the people is the legal one of his century. He tells the reader that practice with "esta miserable gente" will teach the secrets of the language better than "la rudeza de la mia", and signs off: "Sirvete de mi trabajo, y recibe el buen deseo con que te doy esta: NOTICIA, que tu piadosa aplicacion sabrà hacer ARTE." He closes the address to the student with a sentence taken from Nebrija's preface to Juan de Zuniga.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on the 1767 sheets themselves, read as page images of a full-view digitisation of a 146-page copy: the title page, the approval of 18 October 1746, the address "Al estudiante aplicado", the opening pages on pronunciation, the close of the grammar, and one opening of the confessionario. The dictionary was not read entry by entry, the catechism and Enchiridion were not read through, and nothing here rests on the modern literature about Huastec, which was not reachable from this container. The author's other book, the Arte novissima de lengua mexicana of 1753, was not opened.