Tlachtli

[Ian Mursell]

> Thank you very much indeed, David, for this marvellously comprehensive answer;
> I only own the Simeon dictionary and Frances K¹s work, so I¹ve got some saving
> up to do...!  But you¹ve illuminated the path ahead beautifully. What a great
> group this e-list is.
> 
> Very best wishes,
> 
> Ian
> Mexicolore, London
> 
> 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 <http://www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright>
>  
> 
> 
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