Since the moment of contact between the Spaniards and the Indian communities of central Mexico, countless scholars have written volumes on the languages and cultures of the native populations. Nevertheless, the period of contact, the cultural and linguistic processes operative during colonial times, remain relatively unstudied and only partially understood. The study by Karttunen and Lockhart is a scholarly contribution, long overdue, which constitutes a solid working basis for related studies.
The authors have utilized the secular documents written during the colonial period with appropriate references to modern twentieth-century Nahuatl. They are interested in the responses of Nahuatl to Spanish—the phonetic, lexical, morphological and semantic changes which occurred over the prolonged period of contact.
Writing with a clear indication of their mastery of classical Nahuatl, the authors deal first with the phonological and phonetic changes in Spanish loanwords. The discussion notes the phonetic adjustments occasioned by the use of Spanish-based orthography to derive Nahuatl writing. Likewise, letter substitutions in the Spanish loanwords found in Nahuatl texts are discussed in the light of the differing phonetic patterns of the two languages.
Loanword morphology is considered under the heading of Spanish nouns, adjectives, verbs and particles. Under these four headings the writers treat the morphological changes appearing in the Nahuatl texts, as well as the frequency and dating of the alterations. The chapter on semantic change has a section on the response of Nahuatl speakers to new terms of European origin, that is, the deriving of new descriptive terms using native roots as opposed to the use of Spanish loanwords. A second section deals with the semantic changes resulting from the failure of Nahuatl to borrow the Spanish verbs tener and deber.
Appendix I gives loanword lists arranged in chronological order. Appendix II contains translations and transcriptions of sample documents. These two appendixes will prove especially valuable.
The volume is lucid. The examples are sufficiently numerous, carefully selected and clearly explained. While the authors see their primary aim as that of unifying Nahuatl linguistics, their secondary aim of aiding linguists, anthropologists and historians may well prove to have the greater impact. Their volume should be thoroughly mastered and kept as a reference book by every student who uses the colonial archives, or who plans to do research in Nahuatl of the colonial period.
