The Mayan Franciscan Vocabularies: A Preliminary Survey

The Controversy over the Solana Dictionary

Gates, and apparently at his instigation Thompson, have cast some unwarranted aspersions on the Hispanic Society's copy of the Solana. It was Thompson's claim that the Solana was in the Brigham Young University Library (Thompson 1960, 337), which may well have come from Gates' opinion in later life that he had the Solana (Thompson 1973, 65), but Thompson later noted that the Solana was not to be found at the BYU Library nor in the Princeton Gates-Garrett Collection, and further that he had seen the Hispanic Society's Solana (Thompson 1962, 14). It may well be that Gates got a glimpse of the then Huntington owned Solana Dictionary, or of at least some parts of it, and became aware that he had already reproduced nearly the same thing in a photographic copy earlier in the century (about 1915) in the form of the Motul II Dictionary.

Part of the controversy might well stem from the fact that there has been an obvious effort on the part of some unknowledgeable restorer to restore damaged paper and the writing lost on the area which had been destroyed in the Hispanic Society's copy of the Solana Dictionary. For example, starting with the word Aborreçedor on page 2 of the Solana, the left-hand margin for this entry and the next four entries was damaged. The person who repaired the manuscript tried to supply the Spanish glosses, but did so incorrectly. Later on in the Solana on page 228, as mentioned above, starting with "viva cosa: cuxan" (Motul II) / "visar cosa, cuxan." (Solana), the restorer of the Solana could not read the left-hand portion of the entries which he was restoring, and in an effort to fill in the Spanish words used an unrelated and incorrect series of words. (See Appendix C.)

While it is obvious that someone has tampered with the Solana in an effort to restore it, altering some of its parts, these alterations do not invalidate the work as a whole.

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