55

that time both whites and mestizos spoke Aymara but in
most cases only as a lingua franca for communication with
Aymara servants or sellers in the marketplace. Middendorf
was able to find only a few persons with enough knowledge
to teach him the language. Like Forbes, he found no one
who possessed a Bertonio grammar, adding that no one had
even heard of such a book, not even the President of
Bolivia or members of his cabinet. Middendorf was finally
able to find some lawyers who had lived among rural
Aymara and claimed to know more of the language than the
city-dwellers. With them Middendorf reviewed a copy of
the Bertonio grammar in his possession, comparing forms
then in use with earlier ones, noting both, and using
them to draw up rules of sentence formation. In the
introduction to his Aymara grammar he devoted several
paragraphs to Aymara vowel-dropping, giving examples
of inflected verbs, and commented on Aymara verbs of
going and carrying. It is to be hoped that someday
Middendorf's grammar of Aymara may be translated into
Spanish.

In 1917 another Aymara grammar based largely
on Bertonio's appeared, by Juan Antonio Garcia, a Bolivian
priest. Subsequently, etymologies and word lists for
such topics as kinship, place names, and musical instru-
ments proliferated, and a number of Aymara stories, poems,

and legends were written by self-styled Aymara scholars