67

linguistic researchers fail to take cultural as well as
linguistic factors into account in spite of their obvious
importance in a grammar designed for foreigners proposing
to live and work in an unfamiliar society. While care-
fully organized into graded dialogues and drills on topics
generally relevant to altiplano life, the Aymara sentences
in the book sound translated from Spanish, often using
missionary and/or patr6n terminology, and are therefore
both culturally and linguistically unacceptable to some
native speakers. Wexler recognized that the Aymara of
the informants probably showed heavy Spanish influence,
but he was evidently unaware of the social dimension of
their dialect--its evangelical cast--although he did
recommend further research with monolingual speakers.
The book also suffers from problems of translating Andean
Spanish into English. For example, wank'u (Wexler
wanc'u) is translated 'rabbit' instead of ‘guinea pig',
probably because the Andean Spanish for guinea pig is
conejo (Peninsular Spanish 'rabbit').

The second Aymara grammar owing much to Ross,
and the best of the missionary grammars to date, is
Lecciones de Aymara (1971-72) by Joaquin Herrero,
Daniel Cotari, and Jaime Mejia, said to be based on a
dialect from roughly the same area as that of the Ross
grammars. Herrero is a native of Spain; Cotari and

Mejia are Bolivian Aymara speakers bilingual in Spanish.