62

analyzed and presented as to be very difficult to use.
As usual in prelinguistic grammars, the Aymara sounds as
if it were translated from Spanish. On the other hand,
the Spanish translations of the Aymara (or Spanish
sentences from which the Aymara was translated) are in
the popular Spanish of the Andean area which reflects
Aymara structure to a considerable extent even in the
usage of monolingual Spanish speakers. In all, the book
is an interesting compendium of fact and misconception
which should be checked with native speakers before any

of its contents are accepted as valid.

2-4 Linguistic Studies

2-4.1 Synchronic studies

As far as I am aware, the first linguist to
note in print that Aymara has a three- rather than a
five-vowel system was Bertil Malmberg (1947-48). Kenneth
Pike, in his Phonemics (1947:153), included an Aymara
problem with data that clearly implied a three-vowel
system, although Pike left this conclusion to the reader.
Tschopik (1948) and LaBarre (1950) provided partially
phonemic renditions of Aymara folktales with English
translations but without grammatical analysis. Although
transcribed with five vowels and no indication of vowel

length or of syntactic final vowel dropping, the texts