Primary Source: Alonso de Molina, "Aquí comienza un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana," 1555
Copy available in the Primeros Libros de las Américas Digital Archive:
http://primeroslibros.org/detail.html?lang=en&work_id=294556
Benson Latin American Collection: LAC-ZZ Rare Books GZZ IC023
http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b3176183~S10
In 1555, Alonso de Molina, a Franciscan missionary in Mexico, published a Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary titled, Aquí comienza un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana. During the first decades of typographical activity in Mexico, printing in native languages acquired a significance that mirrored the enormous evangelical efforts of the Catholic missionaries. These missionaries sought to learn these languages, create rules of orthography and grammar for them, and use the printing press to standardize their Christian message. The printed text was essential in establishing and reproducing a canon for those Spanish colonists who preached in the vernacular. In the “Prologue to the Reader,” Molina explains why it was important for missionaries to learn the native languages to convert the native people to Catholicism. He also provides a series of notices describing the alphabetical structure of the vocabulary list, how variations in pronunciations were listed, and how verb tenses and nouns were represented. This dictionary provides a distinct example of how Catholic missionaries adopted the Latin alphabet to represent indigenous languages in printed text. Prior to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Nahua had a writing system of their own but instead of adopting these writing forms to spread the Christian doctrine, Catholic missionaries chose to represent Nahuatl in printed text using the Latin alphabet. Relying on the alphabetic system transformed written indigenous communication along western standards, and made printed texts in indigenous languages yet another manifestation of the Spanish colonizing force.
