The Mayan Franciscan Vocabularies: A Preliminary Survey

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank René Acuña for all of his assistance and support for working on the subject of Franciscan Mayan dictionaries, grammars and literature. Although for years we have had numerous conversations and correspondence on the subject, our collaboration began in earnest in 1991. In the summer of that year I was invited to go to México D.F. to work with René on preparing the Bocabulario de Maya Than de Viena for publication by UNAM. Because of the number of problems which are to be encountered in the original manuscript it seemed only logical to look at all other available Franciscan vocabularies and grammars to see if there was some way to resolve the problems we encountered. However, because of the difficulties which we had in using these sources and the fact that the questions we were asking were often not easily found it became obvious that the best solution was to computerize all of this material so that any word or collection of words in these sources could be easily located. Thus began the rather long and at times very difficult job of typing these sources into the computer. A follow-up visit and work season was arranged by René in the fall of 1994 at which time we were able to review the work we had done on the various vocabularies and grammars in the mean time and also to work on making a definitive edition of the Calepino Maya de Motul. The gratifying result of this work is the publication by René Acuña through Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of a collection of works which include the Artes of Coronel and San Buenaventura and in progress the Calepino Maya de Motul and the Arte of Beltrán.

René has been very instrumental in preparing the present article for publication. His contribution to it has been very substantial, especially in questions concerning the Franciscan friars mentioned here and in dating the various Franciscan vocabularies which are talked about in this article.

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