Note 59 — The Printing of the Books
Reading edition
Chirino, p. 3, writes that he was “the first who made converts to Christianity in the Philippines, preaching to them of Jesus Christ in their own tongue—of which he made the first vocabulary, which I have seen and studied;” and Juan de Medina (who originally wrote his history in 1630), p. 54, says that in visiting Cebú in 1612 he “saw a lexicon there, compiled by Father Fray Martin de Rada, which contained a great number of words.” Grijalva, op. cit., f. 124V, writes that Rada “by the force of his imaginative and excellent ability learned the Visayan language, as he had learned the Otomi in this land [Mexico], so that he could preach in it in five months.”