63

Developed for use at the Maryknoll Language Institute

in Cochabamba, this grammar is superior to its predeces-
sors in grammatical analysis, but it has the same charac-
teristics perceived by some native speakers as non-Aymara
or substandard. An innovation useful for students of
Spanish dialects is the provision of two translations of
each Aymara dialogue, one in Andean Spanish and the other
in Peninsular Spanish.

The alphabet used by Herrero et al. is that
adopted by the Bolivian government in 1954. It differs
from the CALA alphabet only in its use of k and q for
the velar and postvelar stops, respectively, instead
of the CALA c and qu for velar and k for postvelar. The
phonology section includes numerous minimal triplets
illustrating plain, aspirated, and glottalized stops.

The importance of morphophonemic vowel dropping is clearly
grasped and suffixes are designated as weak (retaining
previous vowel) and strong (dropping previous vowel) when
they are first introduced, helping the learner to produce
correct forms from the beginning. The book is good on

the Aymara four-person system (while not calling it that),
avoiding Ross's error, repeated by Wexler, of designating
the inclusive fourth person as dual. Full verbal inflec-
tional paradigms with affirmative and negative examples

are presented in the body of the text.