Abstract
The Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala by Fr. Pedro de San Buenaventura is the earliest Tagalog dictionary to have survived. It is a remarkably full compilation of Tagalog language and culture at the time of the Spanish conquest. A study of Spanish thought at the time and a reading of the missionaries' writings provides an insight into the process and motivations for Christianization and interaction between Tagalog and the Christian Spanish culture. The dictionary provides descriptions of Tagalog material culture and notions, even those thought to be of satanic origin and an impediment to Christianization, drawn from a first-hand experience of many years lived isolated among the natives. This is fuller than that of any subsequent dictionary. Most interesting to the linguist is the method the author found for handling morphological forms and distinctions untranslatable into Spanish, unequalled by subsequent dictionaries until modern times. These characteristics of the dictionary are discussed in the light of the role this dictionary was meant to play in the Christianization of the Tagalog population.
