The Mayan Franciscan Vocabularies: A Preliminary Survey

The San Francisco Spanish-Maya Dictionary

There is yet a third dictionary which upon closer inspection shows that it is also derived from the same original dictionary which is the basis for the Solana and the Motul II. It is the Spanish-Maya portion of the Diccionario de San Francisco.

In 1855 Juan Pío Pérez had in his possession a Maya-Spanish / Spanish-Maya dictionary from the library of Dr. Juan María Herrero y Ascaro. Pérez mentions in the preface to his copy of the San Francisco Dictionary that he had seen this dictionary on a couple of occasions, once in 1836 and then again in 1848.²⁰  This dictionary is now known as the Diccionario de San Francisco, so named because it was taken from the library of the Convent of San Francisco of Mérida when that convent was disbanded in the 1820's. The dictionary itself is now lost, but a copy was made by Pérez in the late 1850's or perhaps early 1860's. This copy is presently in the Middle-American Collection at Tulane University.

Unfortunately, Pérez had the habit of reordering the dictionaries he worked on according to "modern" spelling and alphabetical practices,²¹  so at first glance it seems that the Spanish-Maya portion of this dictionary (sometimes referred to as the San Francisco II), while bearing great similarity to the Solana / Motul II Dictionary, is a different dictionary. However, upon closer examination, comparing these dictionaries entry by entry, it is clear that in fact the Spanish-Maya portion of the San Francisco Dictionary is the same as these other two dictionaries.

As far as can be asserted, the San Francisco Dictionary itself has disappeared. Given Carl Hermann Berendt's comments about the Pérez transcript, which are written in the foreword to his copy of the Pérez transcript,²²  it is a shame that the dictionary from which Pérez worked is no longer available, because it would be valuable to see the original and how Pérez changed the dictionary in his transcript.

Endnotes

20. Diccionario de San Francisco (DMSF), Prólogo por J. Pío Pérez (Graz, 1976:VII).

21. The most noticeable of these practices was to eliminate the use of "ç" and substituting either "c" or "z" as is common usage today, and then running these words off to the appropriate alphabetical area. However, unfortunately sometimes in the shuffling about some entries got lost. Another Mayanist of the time, Carl Hermann Berendt, made a note about this problem in his copy of the Pérez transcript.

22. DMSF (1976: XI-XIII).

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