Nahuatl as it was: an exploration of the great dictionary of Alonso de Molina
Nahuatl as it was: an exploration of the great dictionary of Alonso de Molina
April 26, 2021 by John Hessler
Title page of the 1555 Aqui comiença vn vocabulario enla lengua castellana y mexicana, by Alonso
de Molina. Rare Book and Special Collections, Library of Congress.
In 1555 the first dictionary of an indigenous language from the Americas was published in Mexico City. The volume entitled, Aqui comiença vn vocabulario enla lengua castellana y mexicana, was by Alonso de Molina (1514–79), a Franciscan cleric and grammarian. In it Molina outlined the basic structure of Nahuatl, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in central Mexico since at least the tenth century, and the lingua franca at the time of the arrival of the Europeans in 1519.
The book was published by Giovanni Paoli (1500 ? – 1561), who on June 12, 1539, had set sail from the Spanish city of Seville with a cargo that would change the face of the Americas forever. On board with Paoli came all the materials and knowledge necessary to start publishing books in the Americas. Perhaps better known by his Spanish name, Juan Pablos, he had been sent to the New World by Juan Cromberger (d. 1540), one of the most successful printers in Spain, to establish the first printing press on the new continent. Juan Pablos arrived in Mexico City in October 1539 and quickly set up a press that would become known as the Casa de Juan Cromberger. Between Pablos’ arrival and his death in 1561, he published 37 titles, only some of which survive to the present day.
During the early parts of the sixteenth century, Indigenous languages began to be more widely studied and read, quickly producing such printed masterworks as the aforementioned Aquí comiença un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana, and Molina’s great masterwork the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y Mexicana, a bilingual dictionary of Spanish and Nahuatl, published in 1571.
The dictionary from 1571 was a work that took many years to assemble and contains more than 23,600 entries divided into two sections; a Spanish-to-Nahuatl part consisting of 118 folios, while the more often used Nahuatl-to-Spanish section is made up of 162 folios. Molina, although originally from Extremadura, Spain, came to the Americas as a young child, and during his youth played with and became friends with the Nahautl speaking children that surrounded him, learning the language and its complicated polysynthetic grammar from them.
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