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Title page Contents Preface Note on Orthography Introduction On the Translation of Aztec Poetry Guide to the Vocabulary Guide to the Transcription Folio I Folio 2 Folio 3 Folio 4 Folio 5 Folio 6 Folio 7 Folio 8 Folio 9 Folio 10 Folio 11 Folio 12 Folio 13 Folio 14 Folio 15 Folio 16 Folio 17 Folio 18 Folio 19 Folio 20 Folio 21 Folio 22 Folio 23 Folio 24 Folio 25 Folio 26 Folio 27 Folio 28 Folio 29 Folio 30 Folio 31 Folio 32 [Folio 33] Folio 34 Folio 35 Folio 36 Folio 37 Folio 38 Folio 39 Folio 40 Folio 41 Folio 42 Commentary Concordance to Proper Nouns Verbs, Particles, and Common Nouns Appendix I Appendix II Bibliography

In the following pages Nahuatl terms, wherever introduced in isolation from a particular text, are written in a modernized Franciscan orthography descended from the spelling methods of the Franciscan missionary-linguists of the 1500s. This is the Spanish-flavored orthography widely used by present-day writers on Mexican topics, generally disregarding vowel length and the glottal stop. Thus vowels, roughly speaking, have the continental sounds (ah, eh, ee, oh, oo), except that oh and oo, both represented by the letter "o," are not distinguished from each other. Consonants are approximately as in English, except that "x" is pronounced sh, "z" has the sound of the "s" in "simple," and the combinations "cu," "hu," and "tl" are similar to English "qu" (in "quick"), "w" (in "water"), and "tl" (in "atlas" whether initial, final, or mid-word, never like the "tl" in "bottle").

A modernized Jesuit system, derived especially from the seventeenth-century Jesuit grammarian Horacio Carochi, differs from the Franciscan in marking long vowels with a macron, or overbar, and in consistently using the letter "h" (except in the combination "hu," see above) to signal the glottal stop. At various points in the present work, terms are respelled in the modernized Jesuit system so that they may be found more easily in modern dictionaries such as Frances Karttunen's Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl and my own Nahuatl-English Dictionary (here cited as DICT). For simplicity, macrons are omitted except in a few cases, as needed.

The Romances transcription, however, is strictly paleographic (not respelled or repunctuated), and all quotations from the Romances are likewise paleographic, regardless of inconsistencies and outright errors (which are clarified, as necessary, in footnotes to the English translation). Similarly, quotations from the Florentine Codex (CF or FC), Cantares Mexicanos (CM or CMSA), Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario (MOL and MOLS), and other old texts are paleographic.

It may be added that all linguists seem to accept Carochi's (oversimplified?) dictum that Classical Nahuatl words are to be stressed on the second-to-last syllable.

Further observations on Franciscan, Jesuit, and paleographic orthographies will be found in CMSA xi-xiii and DICT 8-11.