Primary Source: Bartolomé Roldán, "Cartilla y doctrina cristiana, breve y compendiosa, para enseñar los niños, y ciertas preguntas tocantes a la dicha doctrina, por manera de diálogo, " 1580
Copy available in the Primeros Libros de las Américas Digital Archive:
http://primeroslibros.org/detail.html?lang=en&work_id=294585
Benson Latin American Collection: LAC-ZZ Rare Books GZZ IC087
http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b3237264~S9
Dominican friar Bartolomé Roldán translated the Catholic catechism into Huastec and compiled a brief guide for Spanish missionaries in Mexico to teach native children the Church’s doctrine in the vernacular. He presents the catechism in both Huastec and Spanish as parallel texts set in two columns per page. Note that in the book, Roldán refers to these languages as “Chocho” and “Romance” respectively. This book was published in 1580 in Mexico City and its main purpose was to disseminate Christian doctrine among colonized native populations in their own language. This multi-lingual catechism provides an example of how Catholic missionaries adopted the Latin alphabet to represent indigenous languages in printed text. Besides being relevant for research about Catholic evangelization efforts in New Spain, this book also serves as a valuable resource for studies in linguistics, language formation, semiotics, and typography.
Moving away from the content of the text and focusing on the form instead, this book can be considered a visual plane for mapping and encoding language at the level of individual typographic symbols (see Garone Gravier, 2008). During the course of translating and printing indigenous languages using the Latin alphabet to mimic phonetics, translators like Roldán encountered numerous difficulties of using current typographic symbols to represent the phonetic constructions of indigenous speech. These limitations of translation are referenced to in Roldán’s prologue. In this section, he describes how he creatively repurposed and combined typographic symbols to represent the Huastec language using the Latin alphabet. He presents a guide to his readers about which symbols represent particular phonetic sounds and lists common consonant-vowel combinations. He also describes how he repurposed symbols and placed them over individual letters to denote specific pronunciations. Roldán’s attention to the composition of text at the level of individual letters and symbols highlights the importance of form and composition in the construction of meaning when trying to create a standardized approach to translating indigenous languages.
