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(aymarélogos). Novels on Indian themes, such as Alcides
Arguedas' Raza de bronce (1945), contained some Aymara
phrases. There was a continuous spate of dictionaries

or handbooks of Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish words and
phrases, as well as both Catholic and Protestant publica-
tions.

The matter of a standardized alphabet for Aymara
and Quechua has engaged the sporadic attention of scholars
and governments for years. In 1939 the Twenty-Seventh
International Congress of Americanists proposed an
alphabet for Aymara and Quechua which was adopted by offi-
cial Peruvian government decree in 1946 (Rivet 1956:265).
In 1954 the Bolivian government adopted a virtually
identical alphabet approved earlier that same year by
the Third Inter-American Indigenist Congress (Rivet 1956:
675).

Catholic missionaries on the altiplano adopted
this alphabet. It represents an improvement over earlier
ones in that it shows phonemic vowel length; distinguishes
plain, aspirated, and glottalized stops and an affricate”
in the proper articulatory positions; and distinguishes
the velar and postvelar fricatives. But it uses the
five Spanish vowels to represent the three phonemic Aymara
vowels and allophones of two of them which are not always
predictable from the environment, unnecessarily confusing

the transcription.