Middendorf’s Aymara Grammar as a Dated Record — talk at the Goethe-Institut in La Paz
On 30 October 2026, I took part in a round table at the Goethe-Institut La Paz, Bolivia, on Ernst W. Middendorf's Die Aimará-Sprache (Leipzig, 1891). The occasion was the book's Spanish translation by Boris Chamani Velasco and was attended even by representatives of the German consulate.
Middendorf compiled his grammar in La Paz in 1887–88. He worked mainly with one bilingual consultant and checked what he heard, form by form, against Ludovico Bertonio's grammar of 1612. My argument was that this makes the book a dated record of La Paz Aymara, sitting between the colonial sources and the language as it's spoken today.
I looked at three examples: his treatment of the distal past -tayna, the vowel-deletion patterns he records, and his observation that Spanish was already shaping the use of the illative for human objects.
I closed with some proposals for the edition. Brief notes in plain Spanish for Aymara readers. Middendorf's spelling kept alongside the modern alphabet. And the Introduction published in full, with a critical preliminary study.
It was a pleasure to see this book find new readers in the city where it was written, 135 years on.
