54

grammatical analysis of Aymara is sketchy but accurate
so far as it goes. Appendix C of his book is a vocabu-
lary of Aymara words, including kinship terms, with
English translations. Forbes cast light on the status
of Aymara studies at the time in remarking on his fruit-
less efforts while in Bolivia to obtain a copy of a 17th
century Aymara grammar or dictionary even though he had
advertised in the papers that he would pay the ‘high
sum of 50 dollars' (274, fn.) for it.

In 1891 the German physician-turned-philologist
Ernst Middendorf published Die Aimara-Sprache, the fifth
volume of his study of aboriginal languages of Peru
(Rivet 1952:558). The introduction to Middendorf's Aymara
grammar was translated into Spanish by the Bolivian scholar
Franz Tamayo in an article published in 1910 in La Paz
(Rivet 1952:558). Later, the Peruvian scholar Estuardo
Ndnez, working from an incomplete copy of the Tamayo
translation, revised and added some notes to it and
published it in a volume entitled Las lenguas aborigenes
del Perd (1959) prepared under the auspices of the Univer-
sidad Mayor de San Marcos in Lima to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of Middendorf's death. The following section
refers to that volume (1959:96-102).

Middendorf indicated that his grammar was based
on Bertonio's and on the dialect then spoken in La Paz,

which he visited on several occasions. He stated that at