Comments on a Review of Michel Launey’s An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl

It may be unusual for a third party to comment on a book review. But Michael McCafferty’s review of Michel Launey’s An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (2011), which recently appeared in Anthropological Linguistics (2012), is unfortunate in tone and highly problematic in content, doing a great disservice not only to the book in question but also to readers who look to reviews to guide them and to Nahuatl scholarship in general. The comments below attempt to provide a more balanced picture.

The 2011 work is the English translation of an introductory grammar of Classical Nahuatl written by Michel Launey in French and published in 1979, nine years before he completed his monumental 1,609-page thèse d’état on the language (1986) but well after he had obtained the equivalent of a U.S. doctoral degree and had been teaching Nahuatl for many years. The original French book, in fact, was apparently based upon Launey’s teaching notes. These, in turn, drew on Launey’s extensive readings in early grammars (Carochi, Olmos, Aldama y Guevara) and the Classical Nahuatl corpus (particularly the Florentine Codex) (Launey p.c. 2014). Launey’s studies of Classical Nahuatl, therefore, began well before Andrews (1975) published his first grammar; hence, it is inappropriate for McCafferty to claim that “Launey drew on Introduction to Classical Nahuatl” (2012:407), minimizing Launey’s profound study of colonial sources. A defective Spanish version of Launey’s grammar was produced in 1992, but the work has never been available in English. Indeed, both the French and Spanish versions are hard to obtain, a factor that apparently entered into the decision to translate it into English.

Translation of any work over thirty years old invariably requires a difficult decision by the author: should it simply be translated (though perhaps pointing out in a preface that the author’s views may have changed and that some information might be outdated) or should it be revised so as to become, effectively, a new edition? The English version of Launey’s grammar falls somewhere in between: the translator, Christopher MacKay, “adapted” it, as the title page indicates. But in most respects it is basically a translation of the 1979 French original. McCafferty, however, regrets that Launey and MacKay did not incorporate “the improved understanding of the language that Andrews brings to his second grammar (2003).” This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of the 2003 revised edition of Andrews’s Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (1975) but the second edition is highly idiosyncratic and unnecessarily complex in its analysis, at times bordering on the unintelligible. For example, Andrews makes extensive use of zero morphemes, in fact distinguishing two types, Ø and . A proper name such as niTezcatl–ihpōca ‘I am Fuming-Mirror’ is parsed as #ni–Ø–(ؖؖTez–ca–tl–Ø+Ø+Ø–Ih–pō–ca–ؖؖØ)Ø–Ø#. A reviewer has complained about this very same point, asking whether such analyses “actually help the student rather than confusing an already complicated picture” (Wier 2005:998). No serious linguist or Nahuatl scholar, let alone someone as accomplished as Launey, needs to (or should) follow Andrews’s style of morphological analysis. This is even more the case for Nahuatl syntax, an area of study in which Launey’s analytic and didactic skills are to this day still unrivaled.

Conveniently, not counting its two-paragraph introduction and its one-paragraph conclusion, McCafferty’s review falls into fifteen paragraphs, each of which brings up a point that he sees as problematic. I deal with each in turn. Page references are to Launey (2011) except where otherwise noted.

1. 1. McCafferty correctly notes an unfortunate typographical error on p. 35: nèhuāntin is mistakenly written for the first person plural pronoun tèhuāntin. His characterization of this error as “inexcusable” seems extreme, however, especially since the correct form appears in all other examples (e.g., p. 37).

2. 2. Launey (p. 72) mentions that there are three monosyllabic and three disyllabic verbs of a category that Andrews has called “class D”; Andrews (2003:65) lists four of each. Launey based...