Post Conquest Literatures Written in Latin Script
The largest part of the Mesoamerican literature today known has been fixed in writing after the Spanish conquest. Both Europeans and Mayans began writing down local oral tradition using the Latin alphabet to write in indigenous languages shortly after the conquest. Many of them were monks and priests who trying to convert the natives to Christianity and translate holy scriptures acquired good dominance of the indigenous languages and often even composed grammars and dictionaries of the indigenous languages. These early grammars of native languages systematized the reading and writing of indigenous languages in their own time and help us understand them today. The most widely known early grammars and dictionaries are of the Aztec language, Nahuatl. Famous examples are the works written by Alonso de Molina and Andrés de Olmos. But also Mayan and other Mesoamerican languages have early grammars and dictionaries, some of very high quality. The introduction of the Latin alphabet and the elaboration of conventions for writing indigenous languages allowed for the subsequent creation of a wide range of texts. And indigenous writers took advantage of the new techniques to document their own history and tradition in the new writing, while monks kept on extending literacy in the indigenous population. This tradition lasted only a few centuries however and due to royal decrees about Spanish being the only language of the Spanish empire by the mid 1700's most indigenous languages were left without a living tradition for writing. Oral literatures however kept being transmitted to this day in many indigenous languages and began to be collected by ethnologists in the beginnings of the 20th century, however without promoting native language literacy in the communities in which they worked. It is an important and extremely difficult job in the Mesoamerica of today, and what that is only beginning to be undertaken, to return native language literacy to the indigenous peoples.
But during the first post-conquest centuries a large number of texts in indigenous Mesoamerican languages were generated. A corpus that today after a hundred years of study remains only superficially known and about which the general public is largely ignorant.
Read more about this topic: Mesoamerican Literature
Famous quotes containing the words post, conquest, written, latin and/or script:
“My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“...he sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Esther 1:22.
King Ahasuerus, after his Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command.