Customer Reviews

Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Contraversions Jews and Other Differences)

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This book provides a fantastic introduction to Nahuatl. The book provides excellent explanations of Nahuatl grammar and uses, from the very start, (as promised) a large number of examples of sentences or phrases to illustrate the grammatical points covered in each lesson.

The book is intended to be an introduction covering the major points of Nahuatl grammar. A few actual texts are provided in the back for work upon completion of the lessons, and there are a few complex and esoteric topics in grammar that Lockhart leaves the reader to investigate with the help of Horacio Carochi's Grammar (available in the dual-language edition translated and annotated by Lockhart).

Together with Carochi's grammar, this book should prepare the student for reading Nahuatl texts.

Here are the strengths:
- Great dictionary that breaks down terms into their morphemes and shows vowel length and glottal stops.
- Nice format, very readable.
- Lots of example texts illustrating grammatical forms.
- Good discussion about the language in it's various stages.
- Not a dumbed down learn-a-language book. Takes a somewhat rigorous linguistic perspective and has a great discussions about language mechanics and even addresses etymology.
- Talks about the evolution of the language and provides texts in various historic stages.
- Talks about the Spanish influence on the language.

Just two things that would have been an improvement:
- Outside of the dictionary, very little of the book acknowledges vowel length or glottal stops. Granted the historic texts themselves ignore these non-Spanish aspects of the language, and the point of the book is to be able to read historic texts, but these aspects of the language are critical in many cases to understanding, so they should be indicated in each example. The traditional readers and writers of the language already knew these aspects and could derive them within a sentence from context. It's difficult for a novice to do this.
- Also, why not just provide a small tabular grammar? It would not have occupied more than a few pages and would have been extremely convenient.

This book would be more readable for an accomplished student of Linguistics. It has many details that are barriers for the beginner in study of Nahuatl but is a very complete exposition of subtle grammatical processes that are not even approached in other grammars.

I am happy that it is part of my library and expect that it will assist me as I continue to learn the language.

This was shipped to my grandson Tim as a gift. He is studying Aztec history & language. He was very pleased. K. Russell