Nahuatl textbooks; dialects

[r. joe campbell]

Fritz,

   In 1972 I started punching IBM cards with the contents of Molina's 1571
Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary with the goal of translating it into English.
Actually, the *real* reason for wanting to do that was to do a project
that would force me to learn the dictionary.  I left Indiana in 1973 and
two Hoosier colleagues later shipped my 10 boxes of Molina to me in San
Antonio on a Greyhound bus.
   By the beginning of the summer of 1974, I had the remaining cards
punched and I was ready to translate Molina's Spanish definitions into
English.  I figured that six weeks was ample time and set to work,
surrounded by dictionaries... 14 hours a day and seven days a week.
Six weeks passed, the summer passed, and teaching classes impeded
full-bore progress, but it was finished in the summer of 1976.  About 25
presses turned it down for publication (fortunately) and gave me time to
add the morphological analyses.  And then it came out in 1985 as
_A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl_.

   To shorten the story, in 1998 I added Molina's 1555 and 1571
Spanish-Nahuatl dictionaries to the project and worked on the three
dictionaries full time for two years.  That was the background for Mary's
and my "Alonso Molina as Lexicographer" that appeared recently in _Making
Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas_ (edited by
William Frawley, Kenneth C. Hill, and Pamela Munro).
   The ongoing project involves the integration of Molina's three
dictionaries, with English translations and morphological analyses.  When
will it be finished?  1972 isn't that long ago....

All the best,

Joe


On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, John F. Schwaller wrote:

>
> I have heard of no project to translate the Molina dictionary to English.
>
>