Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

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ANCIENT AMERICAN LANGUAGES.

(Continued from Vol. vi., pp. 60, 61.)

Since communicating to you a short list of a few books I had noted as having reference to this obscure subject, I have stumbled over a few others which bear special reference to the Quichua: and of which I beg to send you a short account, which may be worthy a place in your valuable pages.

The first work upon the Quichua language, of which I find mention, is a grammar of the Peruvian Indians (Gramatica ó arte general de la lengua de los Indios del Perù), by the brother Domingo de San Thomas, published in Valladolid in 1560, and republished in the same year with an appendix, being a Vocabulary of the Quichua. The demand for the first edition appears to have been considerable; or, what is more likely, from the extreme rarity of the work, the careful author suppressed or called in the first edition, in order to add, for the benefit of his purchasers, the vocabulary which he had found time to prepare within the year.

The work of San Thomas seems to have glutted the market for some twenty years; for we do not find that any one made a collection of words or grammatical forms until the year 1586, when Antonio Ricardo published a kind of introduction to the Quichua, having sole reference to that language, without anything more than an explanation in Spanish.

This work, like that of his predecessor, was immediately remodelled and re-published in a very much extended form in the same year. Ricardo's books are amongst the first printed in that part of America.

Diego de Torres Rubio is the next writer of whom I am cognizant. He published at Seville, in 1603, a grammar and vocabulary of the Quichua; the subject still continuing to attract attention. Still, as was to be expected, the Quichua language was of more consequence to the Spaniards of Peru. No doubt, therefore, that Father Juan Martinez found a ready sale for his vocabulary, published at Los Reyes in 1604. Indeed, the subject is now attracting the attention of the eminent Diego Gonzalez Holguin, who published first a new grammar (Gramatica nuevu) of the Quichua and Inca dialect, in four books, at the press of Francisco del Canto, in Los Reyes, 1607; and second, a vocabulary of the language of the whole of Peru (de todo el Perù), in the same year and at the same press.

It is worthy to remark, as confuting somewhat fully the assertion of Prescott (Conquest of Peru, v. ii. p. 188.), that the Spanish name of Ciudad de los Reyes ceased to be used in speaking of Lima "within the first generation," that the books of Ricardo, Holguin, and Huerta (of whom presently) are all stated to have been printed in the Ciudad de los Reyes, though the latest of these appeared in 1616. In 1614, however, to confine myself strictly to the bibliographical inquiry suggested by the heading of my article, a method and vocabulary of the Quichua did appear from Canto's press, dated Lima,—a corruption, as is well known, of the word Rimac.

That, however, the Castilian name should be employed later, is curious....