Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, and: Workbook for Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Introduction to Classical Nahuatl by J. Richard Andrews, Workbook for introduction to Classical Nahuatl by J. Richard Andrews
As one of the earliest attested indigenous languages of the Americas, works in Classical Nahuatl constitute a particularly important source of information about the native cultures and languages of Mexico before contact with Europeans. This volume, along with the companion workbook and like its predecessor, aims to give students from various backgrounds a basic command of the language in order to read early colonial texts. Because it is richly annotated and discusses many issues in great depth, it will also serve as an important reference grammar for scholars both of Nahuatl and of Uto-Aztecan languages more broadly.
The grammar is divided into fifty-eight lessons (ten more than the first edition), covering virtually all aspects of Classical Nahuatl, including culture. It assumes little or no background in linguistic theory, and after extremely brief linguistic and orthographical preliminaries, lessons are devoted to the basic [End Page 997] features including: nominal and verbal nuclear clauses, different kinds of verb stem classes, various kinds of valence-changing processes (e.g. passives, causatives, and applicatives), nominalization, relational nuclear clauses, adjectival modification, and so on.
It is often difficult, however, to separate out descriptive generalizations from the theoretical apparatus Andrews employs. For example, one of A’s basic claims is the radical autonomy of one language from another: not only does Nahuatl not behave in many respects like English or Spanish, it does not even share such a basic category as the word. Although this is intended as a descriptive guide rather than a theoretical treatise, in a polysynthetic language like Nahuatl, some discussion of formal definitions of wordhood would have been useful precisely because so much of the description depends on clausal rather than ‘wordal’ structures (A’s term). In morphosyn-tax, likewise, it is not clear to what extent the large number of null morphs given in paradigms, such as #ø-ø-(te-c-i-hui)ya + ø-ø# for tecihuiya ‘It was hailing’ (170) or #ni-ø-(ø-ø-Tez-ca-tl-ø ø-ø-Ih-poo-ca-ø-ø-ø)ø-ø# for niTezcatl-Ihpooca ‘I am called “I am Fuming-Mirror”’ (604), actually help the student rather than confusing an already complicated picture.
Because of these potential difficulties, this work is probably best used in the context of other teaching guides, such as James Lockhart’s Nahuatl as written: Lessons in older written Nahuatl, with copious examples and texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) or Michel Launey’s Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981). A’s grammar comes with a companion workbook consisting of extracts from period documents, greatly enhancing the grammar’s pedagogical value, and no course would be complete without both volumes being studied in tandem.
