Lockhart James. Nahuatl as Written

Publisher: Stanford University
Publication date: 2001
ISBN: 0804744580
Number of pages: 264
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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.