Note 80 — The Printing of the Books

Chirino, Primera parte, quoted by Retana, col. 24, implied that Quiñones and Plasencia wrote at about the same time: “The first who wrote in these languages were, in Visayan, P. Fr. Martin de Rada, and in Tagalog, Fr. Juan de Quiñones, both of the Order of St. Augustine, and at the same time Fr. Juan de Oliver and Fr. Juan de Plasencia of the Order of St. Francis, of whom the latter began first, but the former [wrote] many more things and very useful ones.” However, San Antonio, I, p. 532, wrote perhaps with bias in favor of his own order, “Although the Augustinian fathers had come earlier and did not lack priests fluent in the idiom, the language had not yet been reduced to a grammar, so that it could be learned by common grammatical rules, nor was there a general vocabulary of speech; except that each one had his own notes, to make himself understood, and everything was unsystematized.”