Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [192]
It has been claimed12 that Garcilaso’s underlying point was that the Incas understood better than their conquerors the fundamental point of Nebrija, whose ground-breaking grammar of Spanish—as we have seen—had begun with the thesis ‘that always language was the companion of empire’. Garcilaso certainly held the view, still widely held today though not among knowledgeable linguists, that a shared language makes for common understanding and good mutual relations: ‘because the likeness and conformity of words almost always tend to reconcile people and bring them to true union and friendship’.13
Whatever the truth on this point of ideology, the existence of Antonio Nebrija’s works, grammars both of Latin (Introductiones Latinae) and contemporary Spanish (Gramatica de la lengua castellana), demonstrated that it was possible to capture the ‘art’ of a language explicitly on the page. And the missionaries soon flocking to the New World made use of this demonstration to found the world’s first tradition of descriptive linguistics.
Entering Mexico, this new virgin territory for the Church, where bilinguals hardly existed at any level of society, the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars immediately realised that they would have to work through the people’s own languages if they were to make serious progress in spreading the faith.* This meant the languages would have to be learnt. The population to be contacted was vast: many million to set against the 802 friars present in Mexico in 1557.14 Clearly, this was work for many generations. And since there would necessarily be a circulation of missionaries, with old ones retiring and fresh recruits coming out from Spain—i.e. the tradition had to be carried on without the natural transmission of languages through raising children—the languages would have to be taught afresh, over and over, to each new generation of adult learners. For the first time in the world’s history, there was a clear demand for language-learning textbooks, specifically grammars (’Artes’) and dictionaries, as well as native-language versions of the prayer books and confessionals that were the tools of the Catholic missionary’s trade.†
And conveniently enough, there were now the technical means to satisfy the demand: printing presses were installed in Mexico City in 1535; their first known product, the Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana, which came out in 1539, was for ecclesiastical use, and despite its title was written in Nahuatl. In 1546 it was followed by Fray Alonso de Molina’s Doctrina Christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, and in 1547 by Arte de la lengua mexicana by Father Andres de Olmos, and an accompanying volume, Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana.§ Volumes in others of the country’s languages followed, beginning with expositions of Christian doctrines in Huastec in 1548 and Mixtec in 1550. Peru could not wait for the press, and the first Arte of the Quechua language, Grammatica, o arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los Reynos del Peru, was actually printed in Spain, in Valladolid, in 1560. But when printing started in Lima (Peru) in 1583, among its first products were Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Quichua, Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Aymara (both 1583), and Doctrina Christiana… traduzido en las dos lenguas generales de este Reyno, Quichua y Aymara (1584).15
This was just scratching the surface of the unknown continent’s languages. The ultimate harvest of linguistic knowledge that was gained in the Americas, primarily to serve missionary activity, was vast. In 1892 the Count of Viõaza listed 493 distinct languages identified by Spanish linguists in the Americas over three and a half centuries of research, and the titles of significant documents describing