Tlachtli

[David Wright]

Estimado Ian:
 
For individual lexical items Alonso de Molina's 1571 Vocabulario is
indispensable; it's available in the Porrua pseudofacsimile (facsimile of a
19th century pseudofacsimile, a close imitation of the original but reset in
special typeface) and on CD from Digibis, scanned from the original edition.
The Digibis CD, by the way, is a jewel; it has digital facsimiles of nearly
all important colonial dictionaries and grammars, plus other useful and
interesting texts (Obras Clasicas sobre la Lengua Nahuatl, digital ed.,
Ascension Hernandez de Leon-Portilla, compiler, Madrid, Fundacion Historica
Tavera/Mapfre Mutualidad/Digibis, 1998). Remi Simeon's Diccionario de la
Lengua Nahuatl o Mexicana, from late 19th-century France but available in a
more practical Spanish edition from Siglo XXI Editores, expands on Molina,
so it's useful for looking for words and morphemes not found in Molina,
although his etimological derivations are a bit funky. J. Richard Andrew's
vocabulary (now separated from his grammar Introduction to Classical Nahuatl
and placed in the companion workbook volume, in the revised 2003 edition) is
nice to have at hand, since it restores vowel-length and glottal stops.
Frances Karttunen's An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, which you mention,
is a must, also restoring occult phonemes and expanding on Andrews' work.
Karttunen's dictionary doesn't replace Molina and Simeon, however, since it
has far fewer entries. John Bierhorst's work, A Nahuatl-English Dictionary
and Concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos also includes the occult phonemes
and has a lot of personal and place names. Except for Molina, who has
Spanish-Nahuatl and Nahuatl-Spanish sections, the above lexicons are
one-way, just Nahuatl-Spanish, so the new and very welcome addition to the
list of available dictionaries is Paul de Wolf's comprehensive Diccionario
Espanol-Nahuatl (841 pp.), which takes the words from all of the above plus
others, restoring glottal stops and long vowels wherever possible. It was
published in 2003 by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) with
The Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur and the Fideicomiso
Teixidor. All of these sources together work very well as a general lexical
corpus.
 
There are other sources that are good for more specific inquiries or just
for looking up items not found in the others. R. Joe Campbell's A
Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl (1985) is hard to find but
very useful, with a thorough treatment of the subtle shades of meaning of
each morpheme. Pilar Maynez published El Calepino de Sahagún (UNAM, 2002),
extracting all of the Nahuatl words from the Spanish column of the
Florentine Codex, defining them and presenting them in context. Pedro de
Arenas' Vocabulario Manual de las Lenguas Castellana y Mexicana (1611) is
good for everyday phrases in the early Colonial period, like the modern
phrase books for tourists; there's a facsimile edition published by the UNAM
in 1982 and it's included on the Digibis CD. There are several vocabularies
of modern variants of Nahuatl which are useful for finding items that aren't
found in the colonial sources, although diachronic phonological changes have
to be taken into account. Some are probably still available from the UNAM,
the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia and the Summer Institute
of Linguistics
 
Cautionary note: since Nahuatl words usually get embedded in layers of
prefixes and suffixes, dictionaries don't work for revealing the meanings of
Nahuatl texts unless we dedicate some attention to grammar. There are a lot
of grammars; I'll just mention a few. Perhaps a good way to start would be
with Lockhart's new edition of Carochi's grammar plus his text Nahuatl as
Written, both published by Stanford/UCLA. Andrews' grammar, mentioned above,
is very technical but should be at hand as a reference source. R. Joe
Campbell's and Frances Karttunen's Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar is
great for the beginner, although it's not commercially available; it's a
"home-made" photocopy text published at the University of Montana at
Missoula.
 
This may be more than you wanted; the idea is that it's a good idea to get
as much stuff on the shelf as possible, then get to know it over the years.
 
Saludos,
 
David Wright
www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright
 
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