Encyclopedia of the Incas

parish priest in Cuzco, he served initially as parish priest in Juli and, after his
time in Cuzco, as vice rector of the Jesuit college in Quito, Ecuador. Holguín
died in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1618.
Holguín’s first work on Quechua was his Gramática y arte nueva de la
lengua general de todo el Perú, llamada lengua qquichua, o lengua del Inca
(New Grammar and Art of the General Language of All of Peru, Called the
Quechua Language, or the Language of the Inca), which was written in the
late 1590s but not published until 1607. Throughout his Grammar, Holguín
systematically compares and contrasts Quechua grammar to that of Latin and
Castilian Spanish, concluding that Quechua was superior grammatically to
both European languages. The Grammar contains highly useful sections on
kinship terms and Quechua numerals.
Better known and more widely used by students of Quechua and Inca
civilization is the companion work to his Grammar, the Vocabulario de la
lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua qquichua, o del Inca,
published in 1608. This great dictionary of Quechua and Spanish—with 375
double column pages of Quechua–Spanish, and 332 pages of Spanish–
Quechua—is the largest and most comprehensive Colonial dictionary of the
Quechua language, the lingua franca of Inca administration in Tahuantinsuyu.
(Holguín’s is not the earliest dictionary, however; that honor goes to the
Dominican friar Domingo de Santo Tomás’s Lexicón, o vocabulario de la
lengua general del Perú, written in 1560.)
Holguín states that he worked closely with native informants in Cuzco in
constructing the Vocabulario, and he credits those individuals as the principal
authors of the work. The work is structured primarily, though not strictly,
alphabetically, as he often inserts terms related to a certain term by virtue of
their being “sons and relatives” of that term. This makes for a highly
contextualized and richly nuanced reading of many entries. In addition, unlike
Santo Tomás’s earlier Lexicón, which includes very few Spanish admixtures
with Quechua, Holguín’s Vocabulario contains many definitional phrases
employing Spanish terms, thus attesting to the process of linguistic mixing
that was ongoing in the Andes in the seventeenth century.
By any measure, the Vocabulario is a tremendously rich source of historical
and ethnographic information on the Quechua language of the time, and it has
been used to great advantage (and some abuse) by generations of students of
Inca culture and civilization.