Nebrija's Dictionarium

[mary l. clayton]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 pthajovs at UCHICAGO.EDU wrote:

> Has anyone done historical work on the copy of Nebrija's Dictionarium in the
> Newberry Library (Ayer ms. 1478), which adds Nahuatl to the Spanish and Latin
> entries?  According to the Newberry's records, it probably dates to 1540.  At
> first glance, some entries (at least the Spanish entries) parallel Molina's 1571
> dictionary.  Newberry's catalog states that it may be from Sahagún's collection.
>  So, a Tlatelolco provenence seems probable, at the least.  Can anyone share
> more information on this?  I'm especially interested in Nebrija's Latin source,
> and what a comparison of the ms. with Molina may tell us about the formation of
> Molina's lexicon.  Thanks.

******
     As a matter of fact, I've been working on this document for 
longer than I like to admit to myself. When I began working on it, it 
was because I recognized in it a substantial and independent source of 
early colonial Nahuatl vocabulary. Also, it was intriguing because 
there seems to be a lot of misinformation about it. I'm not sure what 
you mean by "historical work". I've chased down all of the 
bibliography that I can find (much of which is secondary and/or 
erroneous), have consulted the librarians at the Newberry and have put 
many years into internal analysis of the text. 

     For those who are not familiar with this document, it is a small 
(in physical size, less small in content) manuscript dictionary based 
on Nebrija's 1516 Spanish-Latin dictionary, which is copied 
(apparently a bad attempt at verbatim) in black ink with Nahuatl 
equivalents added in red for most entries. 

     My early work (references below) established: 
     1) that this manuscript is a copy of an earlier work containing 
         all three languages, 
     2) that the copyist was a native speaker of Nahuatl (not a 
         controversial issue), and
     3) that it is in fact based on the 1516 Nebrija and not on the 
         earlier 1495 Spanish-Latin dictionary (sometimes incorrectly 
         dated 1492). 
     4) I further suggested that internal evidence points to the 
         possibility of a native Nahuatl-speaking author. 

     My goal (I'm guessing that I'm about 80% finished) is a four-part 
work: 1) a close edition of the manuscript with copious notes, 2) a 
Nahuatl alphabetical dictionary drawing together and lemmatizing all 
of the occurrences of the Nahuatl words scattered throughout the 
dictionary, along with their morphological analyses and with English 
translations for Spanish Latin and Nahuatl, 3) a morphological 
dictionary and 4) a monographic treatment of the document and its 
contents. 
     This project has involved transcribing the document, entering 
standardized spellings (including correct spacing) along with original 
spellings for the Nahuatl equivalents so that they can be sorted and 
gathered correctly, doing the morphological analyses, adding several 
comment fields which permit me to make categorized comments on each 
entry for factors ranging from copyist's errors (voiced consonants for 
voiceless, etc.) to semantic fields, (vocabulary related to agriculture, 
body parts, weather, etc.) to notes on errors in the manuscript. My 
husband, Joe Campbell, has been a tremendous help in designing the 
database -- and re-designing it at least twice, as more and more 
fields became necessary -- and has written all of the programs which 
sort and search on the various fields and produce the dictionary 
format from the database. 
     A big hang-up in progress occurred when I discovered that errors 
which I had attributed to the scribe or to the author (the scribe is 
so uneducated that I don't think he could possibly have written the 
Nahuatl equivalents) were in fact differences due to the fact that the 
modern edition of the 1516 edition of Nebrija has been so changed  
that it isn't reliable (it's a critical edition, but still...). So I 
took the time to locate a microfilm of the 1516 dictionary and 
transcribe it in its entirety into a new field in the database. THEN I 
discovered that some of the remaining problems are due to the fact 
that the 1516 Nebrija exists in at least THREE different printings 
(that I know of -- there may be more), which differ a fair amount in 
spelling. So I'm noting differences between the Newberry dictionary 
and the two versions of the 1516 that are available to me. 
     
     Some morsels and observations: 
       The title "Vocabulario trilingue" occurs only on the binding, 
which, according to John Aubrey, Ayer librarian at the Newberry 
Library, is 19th century. (Besides, "Vocabulario trilingue" is just a 
descriptive title. The fact that this corresponds to a title mentioned 
by Sahagun doesn't carry much weight, although the person who had it 
re-bound may have intended it to.) Nothing that I can find relates 
this book to Sahagun or to Tlatelolco. The "Sahagun connection" seems 
to be just wishful thinking. Once you look at the "evidence", none of 
it stands up and most of it is only assertions. 
     The 1540 date is just there, I think, because that's about the 
earliest that a dictionary could have been produced. I've also seen 
them date it at 1590, the year of Sahagun's death. 
      In my opinion (and I have access to the complete database and to 
Joe's Molina and Sahagun databases) the only relationship between this 
dictionary and Molina's is that they both contain Nahuatl and Spanish.
     Obviously, the Spanish in this dictionary is similar to Nebrija's 
-- it's a copy. Joe and I dealt at length with the question of the 
relationship of *Molina* to Nebrija in our 2002 paper (see below) The 
answer there is that, sure, Molina had access to Nebrija, but he used 
it judiciously for suggestions for gathering vocabulary. He excludes 
many entries which aren't relevant to 16th century Mexico and includes 
many many new entries of his own, many of which relate specifically to 
Mexico. 
     Our 2002 paper further increased our awe of Molina as a 
lexicographer. I think he's light years ahead of Nebrija in writing 
dictionaries which fulfill their mission. 
     As for Nebrija's Latin -- I'd like to know more about that too! 
His mastery of Latin doesn't seem to have had the finesse that one 
would have expected or hoped for. On the other hand, he gets a lot of 
credit for his Latin-Spanish (1492) and Spanish-Latin (1495 and 1516) 
dictionaries for doing what hadn't been done before. 

     I could write far more about the topic of this dictionary than 
anyone is interested in reading -- and may already have done so in 
this message. If you have further questions, I welcome them. 

     Cheers,
       Mary Clayton

   some numbers:
        15,479 total entries in the Newberry dictionary (cf. 17,088 
                Spanish entries with 36,954 Nahuatl equivalents in 
                Molina's 1571 Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary). 
        11,059 entries in the Newberry dictionary contain Nahuatl 
                (some have more than one equivalent) 
        11,933 Nahuatl equivalents (tokens)
         9,254 total Nahuatl equivalent types. These will be the 
                headwords in the dictionary I'm preparing. 
        52,515 individual Nahuatl morphemes coded so far. Just under 
               600 words (tokens) remain with incomplete morphology. 
               Some of these require just one decision to be 
               completed, others are complete mysteries. A fair number 
               are garbled entries that will probably never find 
               solutions. 

Clayton, Mary L. 1989. "A Trilingual Spanish-Latin-Nahuatl Manuscript 
      Dictionary Sometimes Attributed to Fray Bernardino de Sahagun." 
      _International Journal of American Linguistics_ 55:391-416  [an 
      initial summary of my findings to an early point -- with the 
      caveat that what I said on f/h was based on a misunderstanding 
      about the modern edition of Nebrija and is wrong.] 

__________. 1999. "Three Questions in Nahuatl Morphology: 'wedge', 
      'helmet', 'plaster'." _International Journal of American 
      Linguistics_ 65:466-84 [details on three morphemes based on 
      evidence from the Ayer dictionary with additions from Sahagun 
      and Molina] 

__________ 2003. "Evidence for a Native-Speaking Nahuatl Author in the 
     Ayer Vocabulario trilingue" _International Journal of 
     Lexicography_ 16:99-119. [my arguments, based on internal 
     evidence, on why I think the Nahuatl equivalents were written by 
     a native speaker of Nahuatl] 

__________ and R. Joe Campbell, 2002. "Alonso de Molina as 
     Lexicographer"  _Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous 
     Languages of the Americas_. edited by William Frawley, Kenneth C. 
     Hill and Pamela Munro. pp.336-390. Berkeley: University of 
     California Press. [our paper examining the three Molina 
     dictionaries from a number of angles. one of the most challenging 
     and rewarding projects I've ever undertaken.]