Overview

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.

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9780804744584

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Reviews

A volume that can be understood by students working alone, as well as by those taking Nahuatl classes. Nahuatl as Written presumes no previous knowledge of the language. . . . [It] is being issued simultaneously with Lockhart's bilingual edition of Horacio Carochi's 1645 Grammar of the Mexican Language . . . . The two works are complementary. -- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts

A volume that can be understood by students working alone, as well as by those taking Nahuatl classes. Nahuatl as Written presumes no previous knowledge of the language. . . . [It] is being issued simultaneously with Lockhart's bilingual edition of Horacio Carochi's 1645 Grammar of the Mexican Language, . . . The two works are complementary. -- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts

Author Information

James Lockhart is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many books are The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992) and Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History (Stanford, 1999)

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