A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl: A Morpheme Index to the Vocabulario En Lengua Mexicana Y Castellana of Fray Alonso De Molinas [Hardcover]

R. Joe Campbell (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 485 pages
• Publisher: Hispanic Seminary of (December 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 094226052X
• ISBN-13: 978-0942260526
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,084,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gateway to classical Nahuatl vocabulary, February 28, 2007

By 

bukhtan (Chicago, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl: A Morpheme Index to the Vocabulario En Lengua Mexicana Y Castellana of Fray Alonso De Molinas (Hardcover)

The Spanish-Nahuatl/Nahuatl-Spanish vocabulary by Molinas is the most important lexical resource for "classical" Nahuatl. However, Molinas indexed his Nahuatl entries by phrase rather than what we would call "word", and certainly not by "morpheme". Such an approach is actually quite sensible; after all, one can dispute word boundary, and other pioneers of Amerindian lexicography have gone about their business in the same way, e.g. Roger Williams in his "Key" up in Rhode Island, not long after. But this approach makes it harder for modern students parsing such texts as have survived.
Campbell has re-arranged the data in the Nahuatl-Spanish section of Molinas' work to make it findable by the headwords that modern lexicography leads us to expect, i.e. by base-forms of the verb, noun, etc. He has added nothing beyond an English translation, though the original Spanish definitions have been retained. The scholar James Lockhart (in his "Nahuatl as written") has praised this work as a good entry point to Molinas.
Campbell has followed Molinas in not providing information on vowel length, nor has he indicated the presence of saltillo. Users will have to go elsewhere, most likely Karttunen, for these elements. Another drawback: the entries are in small, close-spaced print that can go on for pages, with subentries buried in mid-line. So, if you can get this valuable work, have your magnifying glass handy and stop once in a while to exercise a stiff neck.