Blancas De San Jose P Francisco Arte Y Reglas De La Lengua Tagala
" data-medium-file="https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=202" data-large-file="https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=510" class="wp-image-1678" src="https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=233&h=346" alt="The frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín's "Conquistas de las Islas Philipinas" (1698)" width="233" height="346" srcset="https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=233&h=346 233w, https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=466&h=692 466w, https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=101&h=150 101w, https://hiphilangsci.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sanagustinfrontal.jpg?w=202&h=300 202w" sizes="(max-width: 233px) 100vw, 233px">
This frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín's Conquistas de las Islas Philipinas (1698) is an allegory of the relationship between the colonial Country and Church in the Philippines. King Philip II of Spain (right) is seen pointing to the Philippine islands, while St Augustine (left), the founder of the Augustinian order, offers his heart, the usual iconographic symbol for this saint, to illuminate the archipelago through divine lite, as symbolized past the Christogram above. Backside the saint are Fray Andrés de Urdaneta and Fray Martín de Rada, the commencement Augustinians in the Philippines.
Marlon James SALES
Monash Academy
The pastoral visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines in January 2015, which gathered the biggest crowd e'er assembled for a Papal event in history, has put to fore the nexus between translation and faith in this Southeast Asian archipelago. During his many engagements, the Pontiff delivered off-the-cuff homilies in his native Spanish, which were then translated into English past Monsignor Mark Miles of the Vatican Secretariat of State. There were also some instances—such every bit when the Pope had dejeuner with victims of draft Yolanda (Haiyan) in Leyte, or when he spoke with 2 former street children during a catechesis at the University of Santo Tomas—that even required that interpretation be washed into Filipino, with Manila archbishop Luis Antonio Central Tagle stepping in to provide some assist.
The oldest extant grammar of Tagalog
The role that translation played in the recent Papal visit is indicative of the history of evangelization and colonization of this overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Christianity was introduced into the land by Catholic missionaries, who began arriving in the 16th century equally members of expeditions financed by the Castilian Crown. Although the Philippines proved to be a profitless enterprise, it was retained for more than three centuries as a strategic colonial outpost in the Pacific and as a springboard for the evangelization of other Asian nations, most notably Communist china and Nihon (Kamen 2002, 203, Phelan 1959, xiv). A corollary to the institution of Spanish settlements in the archipelago was the repartition of its many ethnolinguistic groups as objects of Cosmic mission among various religious orders present in that location (Sueiro Justel 2007, 51). Given that Castilian migration into the land remained scant throughout the colonial period, the priests were the closest contact many Filipinos had with Spain (Ridruejo 2003, 181).
Beyond the spiritual exigencies of their ministry, the priests were likewise tasked to perform civic and temporal duties, and were regarded as a consummate armory of both Empire and Church building. This view was best summed up in a 1765 missive that the Viceroy of New Spain reportedly sent to Charles Three: "En cada fraile que pise el suelo filipino, V[uestra] M[ajestad] tiene un capitán general y un ejército" (Bearding 1898, 39).[i] One important consequence of this symbiotic relationship betwixt the colonial State and Church—which was then deftly allegorized in the frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín'due south history—was that in club to conduct out their mission to spread the Cosmic organized religion, the priests pioneered an extensive and systematic textualization of local knowledges through the publication of the first grammars, dictionaries and other similar texts on and in the ethnic languages. Sueiro Justel (171) notes that by 1898 there were about 124 grammars and 108 references to vocabularies of Philippine languages, which in absolute terms constituted an accomplishment that was like to, if not greater than, that of Latin America. It was in this context that the Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala, the oldest extant grammar of Tagalog, came into being.
Title folio of the first edition ofArte y reglas de la lengua tagala (1610). The volume was printed on papel de Communist china or rice paper measuring xiv x 20 cms (Quilis 1997, 29). From the drove of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Published in 1610 in the province of Bataan some 116 kilometers northwest of the capital city of Manila, the Arte was considered by the missionaries as the almost authoritative colonial grammar of Tagalog, ane of the major languages in the island of Luzon, and was oft recommended as a supplement to other grammars printed afterward. Its writer, the Dominican friar Francisco Blancas de San José, a native of Tarazona, Spain who arrived in the Philippines in 1595 (Aduarte 1693, 403-413, Ocio 1895, 25-26), was described in Philippine missionary writings as the Achilles (San Agustín 1787 [1703], due north.p.), Demosthenes (Noceda and Sanlúcar 1832 [1754], n.p.), and Cicero (Totanés 1745, n.p.) of the Tagalog language. HisArte proved to be and so important a resource that the University of San Tomas in Manila printed a second edition in 1752, while a third edition, printed by José María Dayot, came out in 1832 (Quilis 1997, 31-32). In the course of my PhD inquiry at Monash University, I have discovered that the State Library of Victoria houses what seems to be the simply extant re-create of the Arte on Australian soil. As far every bit I know, this re-create has never been included in previous catalogues of Philippine missionary linguistics.
Fifty-fifty though the book appears at first glance as a mere grammatical treatise that compared Tagalog to Latin through Castilian Castilian equally a metalanguage, an arroyo that was, more often than not, the accepted mode of grammatization during the colonial period (cf., Auroux 1994, Esparza Torres 2007, Rafael 1993), nosotros also discover in Arte an early formulation of a theory of translation that emplaced the Tagalog people and their linguistic communication into the k narrative of Christian redemption. A common trope in missionary grammars was to imagine linguistic diversity every bit a defect incurred at the Tower of Boom-boom (Barnstone 1993, 43). As such, it was not uncommon for missionaries to refer to linguistic variety every bit a corruption of an original and unitary state of grace. Jesuit historian Francisco Colín, for instance, wrote that, "se oluida la lengua común, y cada vno queda con la suya tan corrompida"[2] (1663, 57). Franciscan grammarian Sebastián de Totanés, on the other hand, dismissed indigenous modes of oral communication every bit uncivilized, and fifty-fifty added that the Tagalogs were "toscos, zafios y de poca reflexión".[iii] These views call to listen Antonio de Nebrija's take on the transcendence of reducing a language to grammatical rules "para que lo que agora et de aqui adelante en él se escriviere pueda quedar en united nations tenor, et estender se en toda la duración de los tiempos que están por venir…"[four] (Quilis 1980, 100-101).
The majesty of divine meanings
To grammatize a language for the preaching of Christian truth was therefore to restore it to its pre-Babelian country of grace (Mühlhäusler 1996, 171). The written report of languages per se was non seen as relevant; Blancas himself, in his 1605 Memorial de la vida cristiana, argued that,
[p]orque si bien la lengua Tagala por lo que en si es ella, es negocio de poca importancia, y que vá poco en errar, ó en acertar á hablarla; pero en cuanto por medio de ella predicamos la verdad de Dios á Gentes que no le conocían, cierto que es ya como otra en el valor. (457) [5]
Missionaries regarded themselves as mediators between God and the colony, who by virtue of the gift of tongues dispensed to the Apostles on Pentecost, were equally empowered to convey God's truth in a multitude of languages (Rafael 1993, 31). "Lengua de fuego os pido," the Dominican prayed at the starting time of his Arte in innuendo to the Holy Spirit that the Apostles received on that fateful mean solar day, "con q̃ abrasado mi pecho, se enciendan los oyentes con vuestro amor."[vi] Blancas located the labors of the missionary grammarian in the interstitial niche between the divine and the colony. The gift of language must be granted to him commencement, the grammarian ensconced in that colonial in-betweenness, earlier the Christian doctrine could reach the colonized Filipinos, whom he described as gullible and weak of heart.
In the course of my enquiry, I found a copy of the 3rd edition of Blancas' Arte at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. Every bit far equally I can tell, this copy is unaccounted for in the bibliographies on Philippine missionary linguistics.
Along these lines, translationality in the grammatization of languages was imagined every bit a search for divine meanings. Blancas spoke of a sure divinorum sensuum maiestatem every bit an operative term in the publication of a grammar. The concept, which was borrowed from St Jerome's epistle to Hedibia and was acknowledged by the writer in the marginalia, differentiated linguistic competence from translational competence. Not all preachers were blessed with the gift of tongue, according to the commentary of Cardinal Tommaso de Vio Cajetan on the promise of language to the early Church, which Blancas cited in his exhortation to ministers. In Cajetan's view, the "discovery" of what was thought of then as the uncharted regions of the globe belied the prodigiousness of Pentecost ("Experimento enim apparet Ecclesiam lingua, vel linguis carere multarum gentium temporibus istis repertarum…"). The new reality of colonial expansion led some ministers of the Gospel to rely on translators ("interpretes") in the performance of their mission. St Paul himself, Blancas connected, was not capable of speaking Greek in a way that was worthy of the majesty of divine meanings ("diuinorum sensuum maiestatem, digno non poterat græci eloquii explicare sermone"), even though he certainly possessed the souvenir of tongues and had a command of the Scriptures. Information technology was for this reason that the Campaigner of the Gentiles had to rely on St Titus for interpretation ("Habebat ergo Titum interpretem"), and St Titus acted every bit his mouth in preaching the Gospel ("Ergo et Paulus Apostolus con tristatur, quia præ dicationis suæ in præ sentirum fistulam organum que per quod Chri southward to caneret non inuenerat").
Blancas emphasized that translational competence was contingent upon one's familiarity with a detail textual typology and semantic field. Basing his caption on a passage from the Summa theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican missionary wrote that the linguistic noesis that permitted his brothers in the cloth to preach on matters of organized religion was not necessarily sufficient to permit them to written report the 'acquired sciences', such as arithmetic and geometry ("non autem quantum ad omnia quæ per scientiam acquisitam cognoscuntur; puta de conclusionibus Arithmeticæ vel Geometriæ"). In other words, while language was ideated every bit a numinous gift, the extent to which it could be utilized exterior the realm of religion depended on other considerations. Language was idea of as an instrument to gain understanding of other fields of knowledge, a view that echoed the humanist traditions in Europe (Sánchez Salor 2002, 293, 297-298, Ynduráin 1994, 74, 202). Grammer was both translatus and translatio: it was both the production and the process of transfer.
The foregoing discussion on Fray Francisco Blancas de San José's Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala provides a preamble on a bigger research project that I am completing for my dissertation. The next stages of my investigation will await into specific examples of translationality and the institution of a schematic equivalent effect by emplotting linguistic knowledge into a Christian(ized) discourse. That, I guess, volition be for another post.
Notes
[i] 'In each friar who steps on Philippine soil, Your Majesty has a helm full general and an army.' All translations from Castilian are mine.
[2] 'The common tongue is forgotten, with each ane speaking in his own corrupt language.'
[3] 'crude, uncouth and of little reflection'
[iv] "then that whatever volition be written in it from hither on at present tin can retain a certain tenor, and extend itself throughout the age that is about to come…"
[5] 'The Tagalog language in itself is an endeavor of piddling importance, and it does not matter so much if one errs or does well in speaking it. In one case through it we preach God'due south truth to people who did not know Him, its value then becomes rightfully different.'
[vi] 'A tongue of fire I enquire from You so that after burning my heart, information technology will so illumine my listeners with Your love'
References
Aduarte, Diego de. 1693. Historia de la provincia del Sancto Rosario de Filipinas, Iapon, y China de la sagrada Orden de Predicadores. Zaragoza: Domingo Gascón.
Anonymous. 1898. Los frailes filipinos. Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos.
Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation: Introduction à l'histoire des sciences du langage, Philosophie et langage. Liège: Mardaga.
Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The poetics of translation : history, theory, exercise. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.
Blancas de San José, Francisco. 1610. Arte y reglas de la lengva tagala. Bataan: Tomás Pinpin [typesetter].
Blancas de San José, Francisco. 1832 [1605]. Memorial de la vida Christiana en lengua tagala [Librong mahal na ang ngala'y Memorial de la Vida Christiana]. 2nd ed. Manila(?): Imprenta de José Mª Dayot, Tomás Oliva [typesetter].
Colín, Francisco. 1663. Labor euangelica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañia de Iesvs : fvndacion, y progressos de su Prouincia en las islas Filipinas. 4 vols. Vol. 1. Madrid: Ioseph Fernandez de Buendia
Esparza Torres, Miguel Affections. 2007. "Nebrija y los modelos de los misioneros lingüistas del náhuatl." In Missionary Linguistics III/ Lingüística Misionera Three: Morphology and Syntax-Selected papers from the Third and Fourth International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, edited by Otto Zwartjes, Gregory James and Emilio Ridruejo, 3-forty. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kamen, Henry Arthur Francis. 2002. Espana'south road to empire : the making of a world power, 1492-1763. London: Allen Lane.
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology : linguistic communication change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London, New York: Routledge.
Noceda, Juan de, and Pedro de Sanlúcar. 1832 [1754]. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. 2nd ed. Valladolid: Higinio Roldán.
Ocio, Hilario María. 1895. Compendio de la reseña biográfica de los religiosos de la provincia del Santisimo Rosario de Filipinas desde su fundacion hasta nuestros dias. Manila: (Estab. Tip. del Real Colegio de Sto. Tomas).
Phelan, John Leddy. 1959. The Hispanization of the Philippines : Spanish aims and Filipino responses, 1565-1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Quilis, Antonio. 1980. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Editora Nacional.
Quilis, Antonio. 1997. Fray Francisco Blancas de San José, Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala. Estudio y edición. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica-AECI.
Rafael, Vicente 50. 1993. Contracting colonialism : translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog order under early Spanish rule. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ridruejo, Emilio. 2003. "La primitiva tradición gramatical sobre el pampango." In Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística misionera-Selected papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, edited past Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, 179-200. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
San Agustín, Gaspar de. 1787 [1703]. Compendio de la arte de la Lengua Tagala. second ed. Manila: Convento de Nra. Sra. de Loreto.
Sánchez Salor, Eustaquio. 2002. De las "elegancias" a las "causas" de la lengua : retórica y gramática del humanismo. Alcañiz-Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto.
Sueiro Justel, Joaquín. 2007. Historia de la lingüística española en Filipinas (1580-1898). 2nd ed. Lugo: Axac.
Totanés, Sebastián de. 1745. Arte de la lengua tagala, y manual tagalog, para la administracion de los santos sacramentos. Sampaloc, Manila: Convento de Nra. Sra. de Loreto.
Ynduráin, Domingo. 1994. Humanismo y renacimiento en España. Madrid: Cátedra.
How to cite this post
Sales, Marlon James. 2015. Translation as a search for divine meanings: Fray Francisco Blancas de San José and his grammar of the Tagalog language. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2015/05/06/translation-every bit-a-search-for-divine-meanings-fray-francisco-blancas-de-san-jose-and-his-grammar-of-the-tagalog-language
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