An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl by Michel Launey (review)

The book reviewed here is an English version of the first volume of Michel Launey's Introduction à langue et à la littérature aztèques (L'Harmattan, Paris, 1979), a grammar of the literary language of the Aztecs. It is deftly translated by Christopher MacKay, who was also an adapter and a contributor, adding inflectional patterns, verb paradigms, and vocabulary lists. The strength of An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl is that it presents grammatical points with clarity and lays out the exotic nature of Nahuatl grammar in a comprehensible way. It has good exercises with an answer key and covers a vast array of grammatical topics.

Still, as one delves more deeply into the book, what emerges is, in some respects, an outdated grammar containing some confusing explanations and incorrect analyses. Since the 1970s, when Launey as a graduate student worked out his understanding of the language that has resulted in this grammar, the indigenous languages of the Americas have been analyzed in considerable depth and detail; many talented scholars have put them under the electron microscope of modern linguistics, and Nahuatl is no exception. Launey himself says (p. xviii) that the original version of his work needed modifications. Indeed, when publishing a grammar over thirty years old, intended for use in the classroom, would not one of those modifications be to vet the original for errors? For his doctoral dissertation, the basis of the book under review, Launey drew on Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (1975), the first of two Nahuatl grammars written by J. Richard Andrews, one of the modern authorities on the grammar and morphology of the language. Yet, Launey's new work reflects none of the improved understanding of the language that Andrews brings to his second grammar (2003), eight years before the publication of the present work. The following are some of the book's problems.

Launey gives the "long form" of the first person plural emphatic pronoun as nèhūntin (p. 35), when in fact it should be tèhūntin. This error is inexcusable and the self-taught will be instantly led astray. (Although most readers in the United States and Mexico relate to the orthography developed by J. Richard Andrews and would not have a quick grasp of Launey's orthography, in this review I follow Launey, including marking glottal stops with either a grave or circumflex accent.)

He states that Nahuatl has only three monosyllabic verbs and three disyllabic verbs in the preterit class he terms "Base 2 Formed with the Glottal Stop without Dropping the Final Vowel" (p. 72). Andrews lists four monosyllabic verbs and four disyllabic verbs for this class.

In discussing the inalienable possessive suffix -yō, it is stated that "the noun has the suffix -yō added to it and must by definition be possessed" (p. 99). But this explanation is backwards. The essential point is that the noun is possessed; this has the consequence that the noun necessarily takes the -yō suffix.

Launey says that "possessive nouns in -yô are derived from nouns in -yōtl" (p. 102). In fact, -yô does not come from -yōtl; both suffixes come from a common source, an archaic verb having the form *tlayō. Andrews is not the only one who has seen this. Even Thelma Sullivan, whose Compendio de la Gramática Náhuatl was published in 1976 and was also used by Launey in writing his dissertation, observed in the English translation of her grammar that -yô "may be from an independent verb *yoa in the archaic period of the language" (Sullivan et al. 1988:143-44).

In presenting "adjectives" ending in -c, Launey says, "About twenty common adjectives seem to be formed by adding the participial suffix directly to a noun stem" (p. 112), as, for example, iztatl 'salt' and its "adjective" iztāc 'white'. This statement reveals a basic lack of understanding of the morphology of the language. First, -c is not a participial ending...