An edited, modern edition of the Jesuit Horacio Carochi's Arte de la lengua Mexicana con la declaracion de los adverbios della from 1645 has been eagerly awaited by scholars with an interest in Mesoamerican culture in general, and by those interested in the Nahautl language in particular. Carochi's grammar on what nowadays is called “Classical Nahuatl” is undisputedly the finest of all grammars produced in the centuries following the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards in 1521. Its clear and concise explanations of all aspects of Nahuatl grammar are in many respects unparalleled even to this day. The problem up until now has been to get hold of a copy of either the 1892 edition or the facsimile edition of 1983. They are both out of print and somewhat hard to read because they require some familiarity with older Spanish. The volume under review remedies all this.

Carochi's grammar is divided into five “books” containing information on the grammatical properties of nouns and verbs, their derivation and inflection, the meaning and use of prepositions (i.e., locative morphemes), and the way compounds of nouns and verbs are made. The last “book” is concerned solely with the explanation and exemplification of adverbs – particles and expressions that account for the added subtitle of the work, “with an explanation of its adverbs.” The grammar is modeled on the conventions of a 16th-century Latinate grammar, but it shows a profound understanding of linguistic phenomena that was rare in Carochi's own time and sometimes even in our own. A valuable aspect of Carochi's grammar for the study of Classical Nahuatl is the consistent treatment of vowel length and the glottal stop. These two features are, with one exception (Rincón 1595), neglected in other grammars and dictionaries of Nahuatl from the colonial period. Many modern grammars, such as Angel María Garibay's Llave del Nahuatl (1940), also lack a thorough treatment of this topic. It was, in fact, not until the 1970s that vowel length and the glottal stop became integral parts of descriptions of Nahuatl (Andrews 1975, Launey 1979, Karttunen 1983).

Apart from this aspect, Carochi's grammar also includes an abundance of examples of phrases and parts of speech, together with explanations and translations that supply illustrations for topics presented throughout the grammar. Carochi usually starts a section by giving the general rules for a phenomenon and then discusses its exceptions and variations. This allows the reader to extract information easily without having to read long sections of text to find specific rules and basic grammatical information.

The translator and editor of Carochi's grammar, James Lockhart, has published a staggering amount of research on Nahua culture and on the Nahuatl language over almost 30 years. He is mainly considered an historian and philologist, but he has worked closely with linguists such as Frances Karttunen ever since the 1970s. Everything I have read previously by Lockhart has been of fine quality, and the volume under review is no exception.

This translated edition of Carochi's grammar is very nicely designed in everything from the meticulous reproduction of the original layout of the front page, to the highly useful index in the back. The text is presented with the original and translation on facing pages, so that the original Spanish text runs parallel with the modern English one. The translation is based on a photocopy of the original edition from 1645, and the errors contained in that edition have been corrected by Lockhart. They are mentioned in footnotes, but with silent adjustments in the body of the text.

The edition is first and foremost an attempt at providing a reference grammar for anyone interested in the Nahuatl language without the need for the reader to understand Spanish. Second, Lockhart wishes to publish his own thoughts and insights that are connected to the information content of the grammar. He does this in abundant footnotes that consist of comments and further explanations that he has accumulated while working on the translation. The edition is in this way supplied with a commentary that runs alongside the original text. Through the commentary, Lockhart provides his own explanations, placing them more or less on a par with the information provided by Carochi's original. The comments do not stop at explanations of the basic structure of Nahuatl, but also includes thoughts on the origin and meaning of words and particles, together with alternative translations of certain Nahuatl passages. Some of these notes may seem excessive or uncalled for, but the edition is in all other respects excellent.

This edition of Carochi's grammar is meant to function as the primary source of grammatical information for students of colonial and historical Nahuatl texts, but alongside it, Lockhart has also published a complementary workbook with examples of text. This volume, Nahuatl as written: Lessons in older written Nahuatl, with copious examples and texts, is aimed at getting students of Nahuatl and Nahua culture started on the translation of colonial documents as quickly as possible.

The book contains 20 progressive lessons structured with precisely this aim in mind. It also has an appendix including examples of text and an explanation of how to use existing dictionaries. Finally, there is a short vocabulary, influenced in layout by Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario (1571), but with vowel length and the glottal stop marked; it contains words and morphemes found within the present volume.

Lockhart is clearly an experienced classroom teacher, a fact reflected in the formulation of the separate lessons. His explanations are concise and lucid, and often less exhaustive and lengthy than the ones found in Carochi's grammar. They are focused on actual texts, from which there are many examples and passages, but these passages do not preserve the original appearance of the texts, since Lockhart has already done the transcription.

As Lockhart states in the Preface, “Nahuatl as Written” is meant to function as a teach-yourself-guide to translating Nahuatl text documents. Together with his edition of Carochi's grammar, it is a course in the foundations of understanding Nahuatl with regard to older texts, complete with the teacher's explanations, since Lockhart himself no longer gives courses in Nahuatl, and many interested students may not have access to an experienced teacher.

Even though one of the more prominent qualities of Carochi's grammar is the treatment of vowel length and the glottal stop, this is almost completely absent from Nahuatl as written. In the lessons (but not in the appendices or the vocabulary), indications of vowel length and glottal stops are not reconstructed for any of the example texts. This is no doubt a conscious decision on the author's part, and it is also in accordance with Lockhart's general methodology. Lockhart takes the position that since the texts lack diacritics indicating vowel length and glottal stops, modern readers of these texts should translate them without bothering to add such absent diacritics, except in certain ambiguous cases.

This somewhat shallow, intuitive analysis of passages of text contributes little to the advancement of the study of Nahuatl, both with regard to “classical” and contemporary dialects. Lockhart's method omits one important stage: one where a systematic discussion of the analysis is made together with a careful consideration of what omitted diacritics should be reconstructed for the constituents of a phrase. Without this stage of analysis, a full picture of the grammatical and lexical possibilities of the Nahuatl language is impossible. This leaves only the intuition and experience of the author himself, which, although considerable, is of little use to the study of Nahuatl or to an aspiring student. Lockhart's long experience with the translation of Nahuatl texts makes the translations provided in the volume reliable, but for a student to teach himself or herself Nahuatl using the same method would in all likelihood not result in the same facility at translation.

I am sure that Lockhart would be the first to admit that there are very few older Nahuatl texts that are without ambiguity and thus not open to the interpretation of the translator. This is precisely the reason for a mode of analysis that thoroughly takes into account all relevant aspects of the language in a way that allows discussion and evaluation.

Nonetheless, I still consider Nahuatl as written useful to anyone interested in learning about Nahuatl for whatever purpose, since it supplies a great amount of information on Nahuatl texts from the centuries following the conquest. The enthusiasm and joy that Lockhart expresses in working with Classical Nahuatl is also apparent, and this makes both volumes inspiring and valuable.