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La Paz) is the dialect on which the grammar is based and
that it is similar to that of the city of La Paz. Three
Aymara native speakers collaborated with Ross in producing
the grammar, a trilingual textbook for English-speaking
missionaries and Spanish speakers. Making use of aural/
oral language-teaching methods, the book presents graded
Aymara dialogues and drills with translations into Spanish
and grammatical explanations in Spanish and English. The
grammar includes cultural notes such as a comment on the
importance of greetings among the Aymara. While it has

an index of grammatical forms and topics (in Spanish),

it lacks a table of contents and thus cannot easily be
used as a reference grammar.

In any case, although it represents a tremendous
improvement over its predecessors, Rudimentos contains
frequently inaccurate grammatical analyses. More impor-
tant, the text still reflects, in the tradition of earlier
Aymara grammars, the usage of missionaries and their fol-
lowers. For this reason the Ross grammar should be used
with caution by persons not wishing to be identified with
or aS missionaries. Also, the CALA writing system used
presents the learner with certain difficulties, especially
with respect to the postvelar fricative symbolized as jj
and reduplicated as the unwieldy and confusing cluster

aaa,