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In 1632, as the Christian Century in Japan was drawing swiftly to a close, three works pertaining to the Japanese language were being published at Rome by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. These works were by the Spanish Dominican Father, Diego Collado (d. 1638), who had spent the years from 1619 to 1622 in Japan. Their publication clearly reflects the vitality of the missionary spirit in that age as well as the important place reserved for language study in the propagation of the faith.

The first two works, whose manuscripts had been prepared in Madrid the year before, were a grammar and a dictionary of Japanese. The third, prepared in 1631, while the larger works were being seen through the press, was a guide to the taking of confession written in both Latin and Japanese.^[1] The grammar, drafted in Spanish, was published in Latin in 1632 under the title Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae. It is this work that is translated here. The dictionary, only at the last moment supplied with Latin glosses to supplement those in Spanish, was published in the same year with the title Dictionarium sive Thesauri Linguae Iaponicae Compendium.^[2] Taken together these three works by Collado constitute the final extant efforts of those who studied the Japanese language first hand during the Christian Century.^[3]

Two other grammatical works must be mentioned here as central to the proper assessment of Collado's Grammar. They are both by the great Jesuit scholar, Father João Rodnguez (1561–1634);^[4] the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam (Nagasaki, 1604–8, hereafter the Arte), and the Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa (Macao, 1620, hereafter Arte Breve). The first is by any standards the greatest grammatical study of Japanese made during the Christian Century. It is further, as we shall see, the primary source for Collado's Grammar. The Arte Breve, on the other hand, is not directly related to Collado's work. Indeed it is clear that Rodriguez' 1620 Macao publication was unknown to Collado. Nevertheless, since the Arte Breve is an abbreviated version of the Arte with a purpose similar to the Ars Grammaticae, a comparison of these two books with respect to the way they systematize the material from the Arte is included in this introduction to contribute some insight into the treatment of the Japanese language at the beginning of the Tokugawa Period.

In presenting this translation two potential audiences are envisioned. The first, and more restricted, group is that having an interest in the history of the Japanese language. It is hoped that an English version of this work will make more readily available this significant material pertaining to the Japanese language as spoken in the early modern period. I use the word significant here to avoid granting excessive value to a work which derives such a large portion of its material and insight from Rodriguez' Arte.

The second, and wider group for whom this translation is intended is that which has a need for an edited edition of an important document in the history of grammatical description. In this area of scholarship Collado's work is of more than moderate significance. It was accepted for publication by the prestigious Propaganda Press; and, even if those more familiar with Japanese than the editorial board of that Press might have had serious reservations concerning the linguistic accuracy of the text, it is reasonable to assume that the Press judged it to be a good example of grammatical description. It thus represents a grammar of a non-European language which suited the requirements of the day for publication at Rome.^[5]

In order to permit this translation of the Ars Grammaticae to be of use in both these areas of scholarship I have made an effort to reduce to a minimum those places where a knowledge of either Japanese or Latin is required for the comprehension of the translation. It is sincerely hoped that the result is not an effort that is satisfying to neither, and thus to no one.

Because of the derivative nature of the text, this translation has put aside a number of important philological problems as better dealt with within the context of Rodriguez' grammars. This decision has its most obvious consequences in the section on the arithmetic, where innumerable data require exposition. However, since a basic purpose of this translation is within the context of the history of descriptive grammar, these tantalizing side roads have been left unexplored. It is, nevertheless, hoped that this translation will serve as a convenient tool for those wishing to make a more detailed investigation into the philological questions raised by the text. But I must caution those who would undertake such an inquiry that they had best begin with a careful study of the works of Father Rodriguez.

With its limitations acknowledged, the Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae remains a document worthy of our interest, and I offer this translation in order that Collado's work may more easily find its proper place in the history of descriptive grammar.

The Grammatical Framework

Collado perceived his task to be the presentation of a grammar of Japanese which would have sufficient scope to equip those dedicated to the propagation of the faith with a knowledge of the proper spoken language of his time. While he concludes his grammar with a brief, and rather presumptuous, statement concerning the written language, his purpose is clearly to train his students in the fundamentals of colloquial speech. His sensitivity to this point is demonstrated by his carefully transforming those examples presented by Rodriguez in the written language in the Arte into correct colloquial expressions in his own grammar.

The description is, of course, prescriptive. But given its age and its purpose this ought not to be construed in the contemporary, pejorative sense. Collado, as Rodriguez and indeed all the grammarians of the period, felt obligated to train their students in those patterns of speech which were appropriate to the most polite elements of society. Particularly as they addressed themselves to missionaries, they wished to warn them away from such illiteracies as might undermine their capacities to propagate the faith.

The description further reflects the traditional process conceptualization of language. This is particularly obvious in the treatment of the verb. Thus:

Praesens subiunctiui fit ex praesenti indicatiui mutato u in quo finitur in eba. … (The present subjunctive is formed from the present indicative by changing the u in which it ends to eba. …) [p. 23].

In general each of the verbal forms is conceived to be the result of a specified alteration of a basic form. Likewise the nouns are treated within the framework of the declension of cases.

The treatment of Japanese forms is based upon a semantic framework within which the formal characteristics of the language are organized. For example, given the construction aguru coto aró (p. 31) and its gloss 'Erit hoc quod ist offere: idest offeret (It will be that he is to offer, or he will offer),' it is clear that the aguru coto is classified as an infinitive because of its semantic equivalence to offere. The same is true of the latter supine. If the form in Latin is closely associated with such constructions as 'easy to,' or 'difficult to,' the semantically similar form which appears as the element iomi in iominicui 'difficult to read,' must be classed as the latter supine. Rodriguez in his Arte Breve of 1620—unknown to Collado—makes an attempt to classify the structural units of Japanese along more formal lines; but in Collado's treatment the semantic, and for him logical and true, classes established by the formal structure of Latin constitute the theoretical framework through which the Japanese language is to be described.

Collado makes reference to two specific sources of influence upon his grammar. The first is included in the title to the first section of the grammar, Antonius Nebrissensis. It is to this great Spanish humanist, better known as Antonio Lebrija (1444–1522), that Collado turns for the model of his description.

An examination of Lebrija's grammar, the Introductiones Latinae (Salamanca, 1481), shows that from the basic outline of his presentation, to the organization of subsections and the selection of terminology, there is little departure by Collado from his predecessor.

Even in such stylistic devices as introducing the interrogatives by giving the form, following it with "to which one responds," and then listing a number of characteristic answers; Collado is faithful to the Introductiones.

But it is from his Jesuit colleague, Father João Rodriguez, that Collado receives his most significant influence. There is no section of his grammar that does not reflect Rodriguez' interpretation of the raw linguistic data of Japanese. On the basis of the innumerable examples taken from Rodriguez—most of the substantive sentences are directly quoted from the Arte—as well as the parallel listing of forms and identical descriptions of certain grammatical phenomena, it is clear that the writing of the Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae consisted to no small degree of abridging the exhaustive material contained in Rodriguez' grammar and arranging it within the framework of Lebrija's Introductiones.

To say that Collado followed Lebrija in the general structure of his description is not to imply that he fell heir to all of his precursor's virtues. The Salamanca grammar of 1481 is a masterpiece of orderly presentation. Printed in lettera formata with carefully indented subdivisions, it offers the student a clear display of the conjugational system as well as long columns of Latin examples of a given grammatical structure, accompanied on the right side of the page with Spanish equivalents. Collado makes little effort at copying this orderly display. There are in his presentation no paradigms, but instead only loosely connected sentences that talk the student through the various forms of the conjugation; and there is no orderly array of examples. Add to this the innumerable factual and typographical errors, and one is left with a presentation that lacks most of the basic scholarly virtues of its precursor.

A similar criticism may be leveled against the work from the point of view of Rodriguez' influence. Without matching the Introductiones in orderliness, the Arte more than compensates for its casual format by containing a mass of exhaustively collected and scrupulously presented linguistic data.^[6] There was available no better source than the Arte from which Collado might have culled his examples of Japanese.

One doubt that remains in assessing Collado's use of Rodriguez' material is that perhaps his presentation of the most readily understandable material in the Arte is not so much an effort on his part to simplify the learning of Japanese for his students, as it is a reflection of his lack of adequate familiarity with the language he was teaching.

The Phonological System

A study of the phonological data reveals the Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae to be of minimal historical value. Any student of the phonology of early modern Japanese should turn to the far more reliable work of Father Rodriguez. Nevertheless, certain aspects of Collado's transcription require our attention.

The most obvious innovation in the representation of the language is Collado's transcription with an i of the palatal consonant which all his contemporaries record with a y. Thus in the text we find iomi and coie (terms for native words and Chinese borrowings) where Rodriguez writes yomi and coye. This change was affected while the text was being translated from the Spanish manuscript which uses y; and Collado himself must have felt the innovation to be of dubious value since he retained y for the spellings in the Dictionarium.^[7]

Collado's handling of the nasal sounds is too inconsistent to be a reliable source for phonological data. Given his rather awkward specification that nasalization is predictable before what we must assume he means to be the voiced stops and affricates,^[8] his grammar presents an uncomfortably irregular pattern in the transcription of the phenomena. Thus, on page 39 we find vo mõdori aró ca? as well as modori aró ca?. Again, what he presents as the ending zũba in his description of the formation of the negative conditional (p. 34) appears in tovazunba in its only occurrence in a sample sentence (p. 62). To further confound the issue such forms as tovazunba and qinpen occur in contrast to sambiacu, varambe, and varãbe.

In Chart 1 the traditional pattern of the gojūonzu (chart of 50 sounds) is followed as a convenient framework in which to display the transcriptional system employed by Collado.