Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8): Aboriginal America
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8): Aboriginal America
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
The most voluminous grammatical work on the language of the Incas
had for its author the Jesuit Diego Gonzales Holguin. This learned
missionary was the scion of a distinguished family in Estremadura,
and was befriended in his youth by his relation, Don Juan de Obando,
President of the Council of the Indies. After graduating at Alcalá
de Henares he became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1568, and
went out to Peru in 1581. He resided for several years in the Jesuit
college at Juli, near the banks of Lake Titicaca, where the fathers had
established a printing-press, and here he studied the Quichua language.
He was entrusted with important missions to Quito and Chili, and was
nominated interpreter by the Viceroy Toledo. His later years were
passed in Paraguay, and when he died at the age of sixty-six, in 1618,
he was rector of the college at Asuncion. His Quichua dictionary was
published at Lima in 1586, and a second edition appeared in 1607,[1313]
the same year in which the grammar first saw the light.[1314] The
Quichua grammar of Holguin is the most complete and elaborate that has
been written, and his dictionary is also the best in every respect.
While Holguin was studiously preparing these valuable works on the
Quichua language in the college at Juli, a colleague was laboring with
equal zeal and assiduity at the dialect spoken by the people of the
Collao, to which the Jesuits gave the name of Aymara. Ludovico Bertonio
was an Italian, a native of the marches of Ancona. Arriving in Peru in
1581, he resided at Juli for many years, studying the Aymara language,
until, attacked by gout, he was sent to Lima, where he died at the age
of seventy-three, in 1625. His Aymara grammar was first published at
Rome in 1603,[1315] but a very much improved second edition,[1316] and
a large dictionary of Aymara,[1317] were products of the Jesuit press
at Juli in 1612. Bertonio also wrote a catechism and a life of Christ
in Aymara, which were printed at Juli.
A vocabulary of Quichua by Fray Juan Martinez was printed at Lima in
1604, and another in 1614. Four Quichua grammars followed during the
seventeenth century. That of Alonso de Huerta was published at Lima in
1616; the grammar of the Franciscan Diego de Olmos appeared in 1633;
Don Juan Roxo Mexia y Ocon, a native of Cuzco, and professor of Quichua
at the University of Lima, published his grammar in 1648; and the
grammar of Estevan Sancho de Melgar saw the light in 1691.[1318] Leon
Pinelo also mentions a Quichua grammar by Juan de Vega. The anonymous
Jesuit refers to a Quichua dictionary by Melchior Fernandez, which is
lost to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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