The purpose of this translation of Collado's Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae of 1632 is to make more readily available to the scholarly community an annotated version of this significant document in the history of both Japanese language study and grammatical description in general.
Translated by Richard L. Spear, 1975.
g 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. 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 transc