Customer Reviews

Introduction to Classical Nahuatl

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I bought the first edition of this remarkable book about 20 years ago and was very interested in seeing the new edition. On the whole I think the alterations are a bit disappointing. Andrews describes the changes as being motivated partly by experience of teaching Nahuatl, which he knows about and I don't; but I think he's made an already notoriously hard-going book if anything a bit more user-unfriendly.
The long new introduction explaining linguistic background concepts is particularly obscure and at least in part muddled (eg between different levels of phonemic analysis). A specially irritating change (for me) is the analysis of the personal prefixes into two morphemes each; this has the horrible side-effect that every full word (nuclear phrase in Andrews-speak) now has a zero-morph as its second component in all contexts. This strikes me as theoretically bizarre and practically confusing.
Andrews is prone to acerbic remarks about contemporary fellow-students of Nahuatl (though the more I see of mistranslated Nahuatl names in general works, the more I see his point of view). He seems to have taken a scunner to poor old Fr Molina too since the first edition; Fr Molina didn't have the benefit of our liberal education.
A. could, I think, cut his reader some slack in exposition. Certainly, as he implies, the truth is complex and often exotic and well-meaning attempts to gloss over this may prevent real learning. But a bit of justification of his theoretical position on especially the "omnipredicative" aspect of Nahuatl grammar would probably help. He doesn't really address the source of the difficulty for the new student; anybody sophisticated enough to be tackling this hard book at all is not really going to need to be told that "corremos" in Spanish is a complete sentence (unless his mind has been addled by doctrinaire Chomskyan UG). The difficulty is accepting that Nahuatl noun words are always predicative. This doesn't seem to be true of modern Nahuatl dialects for example (which have however been much influenced by Spanish). Nor is it true, as A. states, that this is at all widespread in N American languages; for it to be a valid analysis it is not enough that a noun can stand alone as a complete predication; it is also necessary to show that there is no formal distinction between a noun argument and a relative clause based on a noun predicate. It certainly is true however of e.g. Salishan languages and others; and a number of polysynthetic languages throughout the world have a very hazy distinction between predicates and arguments. For Nahuatl the correctness (and beauty) of A's analysis is pretty clear, but I think he could do a much better job of explaining and justifying its rationale at the outset. I'm not sure the his consistent translation of eg. cuahuitl (in isolation) as "It is a tree" rather than just "tree" is helpful. Michel Launey manages to bring out the structure of Nahuatl without this sort of clumsy periphrasis, by explaining the omnipredicative syntax rather than building it into every gloss. However, this is really only to say that I myself don't find it helpful; I presume A's experience of actually teaching Nahuatl is what led to his decision to do this.

The insistence on "words" being really "nuclear phrases" has a consequence that inter-word/phrase syntax gets relatively short shrift; useful things for example can be said about word order in Nahuatl which don't find a mention here.

I think at the end of the day that the trouble with this book is that it's really a reference grammar (and a good and thorough one at that) rather than the progressive learning course it's presented as. Linguistically sophisticated readers can use reference grammars for learning languages; but they won't need to be told what a phoneme is. Readers who do need to be told what a phoneme is will probably not get far with a book like this. I don't think that such readers are doomed inevitably to misunderstand Nahuatl syntax as distorted Indoeuropean syntax; but they do need more help than this.

On its own terms, though, A's exposition is a thing of beauty; his determination to present Nahuatl in its own terms does indeed bring out the "strange but neatly functioning logic" of the language.

I should say that the three stars I am giving this book are well-deserved simply because of the author's meticulous description of Nahuatl grammar. It is evident that he knows the language well and that he has given a great deal of thought to how to best explain its structure. It is also interesting, from the point of view of a linguist, to see the way in which he has organized his grammar. In his own words, he seeks to examine Nahuatl as "a system operating from within its own structuring principles and rules".

There is something very appealing about that idea, as it is a common complaint that the native languages of the Americas are too often analyzed from a biased Western perspective. However, it strikes me as highly presumptuous of the author to assume that his terminology and organizing principles are the only ones that accurately reflect the structure of Nahuatl. In this case, as Andrews' grammar purports to be a learning grammar, indeed an "introduction" to the language, what would seem most important to me is that it give students a firm ability to correctly interpret Nahuatl texts -all that remain of the classical language.

This is precisely where Andrews' text fails, in large part due to his insistence on using his own ponderous terminology. Students will grow accustomed to terms like "verbal nuclear clause", but descriptions like "mainline specific projective causative-object pronoun" must frustrate even someone familiar with Andrews' terminology. The merit in using more standard linguistic terms is that they are readily understood by anyone with a background in linguistics, or anyone who has carefully studied the grammar of another language. I believe it is possible to use standard terms and still accurately describe Nahuatl; both Michel Launey and James Lockhart have written grammars that do just that (Lockhart's is very much an introductory grammar while Launey's is quite complete). This is corroborated by the fact that this second edition of Andrews' grammar, which as he says gives "even more attention to Nahuatl's individuality", is considered inferior to the first edition by every Nahuatl researcher I have spoken to.

Also annoying, especially from a linguist's perspective, is his tendency to want to divide and subdivide every morpheme; many of the divisions he makes are likely etymological and not pertinent to understanding the language, and others feel invented. For instance, he divides object pronouns like "nech" and "mitz" into "n+ech" and "m+itz", where both "ech" and "itz" are objective case markers. Indeed, "ech" and "itz" may be related, but he offers no explanation for why the two variants are used as they are, nor for why they are not expressed in the third person forms "c"/"qui" and "quim". This is roughly equivalent to saying that English "them" is in fact "the+m", where "m" is an objective case marker (also found on "who+m" and "hi+m"), which is not expressed in first and second person forms like "me" and "us". No linguist would actually propose such a rule for English, yet it is just what Andrews does for Nahuatl. Here, his attention to detail becomes overanalysis.

If you are considering buying this book because you would like to begin to study Classical Nahuatl, I would instead recommend Lockhart's "Nahuatl as Written", which is very easy to come by and is also much less expensive than this book, or Launey's grammar, which can be found in both French and Spanish editions but which is harder to find in the U.S. For the serious researcher of Nahuatl, Andrews' book is useful to have as a reference because of the author's thoroughness and attention to detail, but by all accounts the 1975 edition is the better of the two.