Grammar of the Mexican Language with an Explanation of its Adverbs (1645), and: Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl with Copious Examples and Texts (review)

In the last quarter of a century James Lockhart has emerged as the leading scholar of early colonial Mexico as a result of his impressive studies based on documentation in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. In that time he has also trained a whole generation of scholars competent in Nahuatl and other native languages of Mesoamerica. The two books under consideration here form the basis of what may be called the Lockhart method for teaching Nahuatl. In the United States there are three major methods used for teaching Nahuatl. One, based at Indiana University, is represented by the "Foundation Course in Classical Nahuatl" developed by R. Joe Campbell and Frances Karttunen. J. Richard Andrews of Vanderbilt University is the person associated with the second method thanks to his important book Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, first printed by the University of Texas Press; a completely new and extensively revised edition will appear in the spring of 2003 published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The third method is that of Lockhart. All of these methods are similar in that they combine a relatively short introduction to the language, its structure, and basic vocabulary, brought together with readings from original documents, to allow the student to develop the requisite skills with the language.

The two books considered here form the basis of the Lockhart method. The grammatical aspect in found in the Grammar of the Mexican Language by Horacio Carochi, SJ, originally published in 1645, and still considered the standard by which other grammars are judged. The other, Nahuatl as Written, is a collection of lessons used to accompany the grammar. Initially Lockhart did not write his own introduction to Nahuatl but rather relied on Carochi grammar, supplementing it with brief lessons he wrote himself.

The Carochi grammar of Nahuatl was a landmark in the study of the language. It appeared at a time when missionary activity was changing dramatically. The first friars engaged in the evangelization with a true fervor. By the middle of the sixteenth century, that fervor had worn off yet much remained to be done on the missionary front. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, after the Spaniards had been in New Spain a full century, the very nature of the missionary effort shifted to one of maintenance rather than evangelization. As Lockhart has pointed out in other works, this is also the time when Nahuatl itself had changed to become a more hybrid language accepting words from Spanish. Consequently on many fronts the emergence of the Carochi grammar marked a turning point.

Lockhart has presented the Carochi grammar in a format in which the original and the translation are on facing pages. In his edition, Lockhart has varied slightly from the use of the diacritics for which Carochi was justly famous. Nahuatl has vowels that are either long, in the sense of long duration, or short. Carochi was one of the first Europeans to discern this feature, and he applied diacritical marks to distinguish between them. In the 1645 edition, Carochi used the acute accent (´) to mark the short vowel. Unfortunately he used the grave accent (')to note the presence of a glottal stop, a consonant in Nahuatl that is largely absent from Spanish and English. The confusion over the similarity of these two marks caused Lockhart to use the breve ((breve)) for the short vowel. In the translation of the text to English, all of the Nahuatl examples remain in Nahuatl. Nevertheless, Lockhart has chosen to standardize the...