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.
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.
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.
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.
Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
This ethnohistory uses colonial-era native-language texts written by Nahuas to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The book offers the first internal ethnographic view of central Mexican indigenous communities in the critical time of independence, when modern Mexican Spanish developed its unique character, founded on indigenous concepts of space, time, and grammar. The Aztecs at Independence opens a window into the cultural life of writers, leaders, and worshippers--Nahua women and men in the midst of creating a vibrant community.
This book, based on many years of teaching the natural language, is a set of lessons that can be understood by students working alone or used in organized classes and contains an abundance of examples that serve as exercises.
A portal to the ancient hieroglyphic script of the Aztec Empire. For more than three millennia the cultures of Mesoamerica flourished, yielding the first cities of the Western Hemisphere and developing writing systems that could rival those of the East in their creativity and efficiency. The Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs reigned over one of the greatest imperial civilizations the Americas had ever seen, and until now their intricate and visually stunning hieroglyphs have been overlooked in the story of writing. In this innovative volume Gordon Whittaker provides the reader with a step-by-step, illustrated guide to reading Aztec glyphs, as well as the historical and linguistic context needed to appreciate and understand this fascinating writing system. He also tells the story of how this enigmatic language has been deciphered and gives a tour through Aztec history as recorded in the richly illustrated hieroglyphic codices. This groundbreaking guide is essential reading for anyone interested in the Aztecs, hieroglyphs, or ancient languages.
In this significant work, Olko reconstructs the repertory of insignia of rank and the contexts and symbolic meanings of their use, along with their original terminology, among the Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mesoamerica from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. In this interpretive study and handy reference, Olko engages with and builds upon extensive worldwide scholarship and skillfully illuminates this complex topic, creating a vital contribution to the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican studies. Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World substantially expands and elaborates the themes of Olko’s Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office: Elite Costume and Insignia of Power in Aztec and Early Colonial Mexico, originally published in Poland and never released in North America.
