Nahuatl as Written

Nahuatl was the primary native language of central Mexico both before and after the Spanish conquest. It is the Latin of the indigenous languages of the New World. Its tradition of alphabetic writing goes back to the middle years of the sixteenth century and embraces not only grammars, dictionaries, collections of preconquest lore, and works of religious instruction, but also, above all, a great mass of mundane writing by the Nahuas themselves for their own purposes. Though the past quarter century has seen a flourishing of ethnohistorical, philological, and grammatical studies based on this corpus, those interested in the world of Nahuatl texts still find access to it difficult.

James Lockhart, an eminent historian of early Latin America, is also perhaps the leading interpreter of this large body of work. He has translated and edited a wide range of texts, analyzed their cultural and linguistic implications, and over the years trained a large number of students, several of whom have gone on to become well known scholars of Nahuatl and other indigenous languages.

Lockhart's main tools of instruction were: (1) a gradually growing set of lessons consisting primarily of examples culled from many sources of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (or concocted in the spirit of that time), and (2) the grammar or Arte of Nahuatl published in Spanish by the Florentine Jesuit Horacio de Carochi in 1645. In small groups of students, with a maximum of personal instruction and discussion, these materials accomplished their purpose, but the lessons were only in skeletal form, and the Carochi grammar, too, in the Spanish editions available, needed extensive explanation.

Now, Lockhart has organized and expanded these materials into volumes that can be understood by students working alone or used in organized Nahuatl classes. The two books together will allow any seriously interested person to master Nahuatl sufficiently to begin reading the texts, and they will provide essential reference works as one progresses. They are geared primarily to the older form of the language and its written texts, but they can also be extremely useful to those studying the spoken Nahuatl of later times.

Nahuatl as Written presumes no previous knowledge of the language. Treating all essential features of Nahuatl, it is organized on purely pedagogical principles,...read more...