Introduction To Classical Nahuatl

Now available to an English-speaking audience, this book is a comprehensive grammar of classical Nahuatl, the literary language of the Aztecs. It offers students of Nahuatl a complete and clear treatment of the language's structure, grammar and vocabulary. It is divided into 35 chapters, beginning with basic syntax and progressing gradually to more complex structures. Each grammatical concept is illustrated clearly with examples, exercises and passages for translation. A key is provided to allow students to check their answers. By far the most approachable textbook of Nahuatl available, this book will be an excellent teaching tool both for classroom use and for readers pursuing independent study of the language. It will be an invaluable resource to anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, archaeologists and linguists alike.

Nahuatl is the language used by the ancient Aztecs and the Nahua Indians of Central Mexico. This text introduces the language using an anthropological approach, teaching learners to understand Nahuatl according to its own distinctive grammar and to reject translationalist descriptions based on English or Spanish notions of grammar. In particular, the author emphasizes the nonexistence of words in Nahuatl (except for the few so-called particles) and stresses the nuclear clause as the basis for Nahuatl linguistic organization.

This is a comprehensive modern dictionary of the major indigenous language of Mexico, the language of the Aztecs and many of their neighbors. Nahuatl speakers became literate within a generation of contact with Europeans, and a vast literature has been composed in Nahuatl beginning in the mid-sixteenth century and continuing to the present.

Learn Nahuatl, the language used by the Mexica (Aztec) civilization and still preserved by over a million people in Mexico. This guide is not written for the expert linguist, but rather for the beginner. Included are hundreds of examples and dozens of practice sets. An emphasis is placed on the Huasteca variety of Chicontepec, Veracruz. This second edition presents with improved updates, more vocabulary sections, larger reference dictionary, and new included grammar sections.

Laack’s study presents an innovative interpretation of Aztec religion and art of writing. She explores the Nahua sense of reality from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion and analyzes Indigenous semiotics and embodied meaning in Mesoamerican pictorial writing.

For many years, J. Richard Andrews’s Introduction to Classical Nahuatl has been the standard reference work for scholars and students of Nahuatl, the language used by the ancient Aztecs and the Nahua Indians of Central Mexico. Andrews’s work was the first book to make Nahuatl accessible as a coherent language system and to recognize such crucial linguistic features as vowel length and the glottal stop. Accompanied by a workbook, this long-awaited new edition is extensively revised, enlarged, and updated with the latest research. The revised edition is guided by the same intentions as those behind the first. Andrews’s approach is "anthropological," teaching us to understand Nahuatl according to its own distinctive grammar and to reject translationalist descriptions based on English or Spanish notions of grammar. In particular, Andrews emphasizes the nonexistence of words in Nahuatl (except for the few so-called particles) and stresses the nuclear clause as the basis for Nahuatl linguistic organization. Besides an increase in the number of chapters (from forty-eight to fifty-seven, including a more detailed treatment of place names), the new edition contains an innovative approach to personal names and the introduction of the square zero to indicate irregular morphological silence. The accompanying workbook provides exercises linked to the text, a key to the exercises, and an extensive vocabulary list.