An examination of Lebrija's grammar, the Introductiones Latinae (Salamanca, 1481), shows that from the basic outline of his presentation, to the organization of subsections and the selection of terminology, there is little departure by Collado from his predecessor.
Even in such stylistic devices as introducing the interrogatives by giving the form, following it with "to which one responds," and then listing a number of characteristic answers; Collado is faithful to the Introductiones.
But it is from his Jesuit colleague, Father João Rodriguez, that Collado receives his most significant influence. There is no section of his grammar that does not reflect Rodriguez' interpretation of the raw linguistic data of Japanese. On the basis of the innumerable examples taken from Rodriguez—most of the substantive sentences are directly quoted from the Arte—as well as the parallel listing of forms and identical descriptions of certain grammatical phenomena, it is clear that the writing of the Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae consisted to no small degree of abridging the exhaustive material contained in Rodriguez' grammar and arranging it within the framework of Lebrija's Introductiones.
To say that Collado followed Lebrija in the general structure of his description is not to imply that he fell heir to all of his precursor's virtues. The Salamanca grammar of 1481 is a masterpiece of orderly presentation. Printed in lettera formata with carefully indented subdivisions, it offers the student a clear display of the conjugational system as well as long columns of Latin examples of a given grammatical structure, accompanied on the right side of the page with Spanish equivalents. Collado makes little effort at copying this orderly display. There are in his presentation no paradigms, but instead only loosely connected sentences that talk the student through the various forms of the conjugation; and there is no orderly array of examples. Add to this the innumerable factual and typographical errors, and one is left with a presentation that lacks most of the basic scholarly virtues of its precursor.
A similar criticism may be leveled against the work from the point
of view of Rodriguez' influence. Without matching 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.[[6]] 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 transcription require our attention.
The most obvious innovation in the representation of the language is Collado's transcription with an i of the palatal consonant which all his contemporaries record with a y. Thus in the text we find iomi and coie (terms for native words and Chinese borrowings) where Rodriguez writes yomi and coye. This change was affected while the text was being translated from the Spanish manuscript which uses y; and Collado himself must have felt the innovation to be of dubious value since he retained y for the spellings in the Dictionarium.[[7]]