When you go on to apply your knowledge to reading Classical Nahuatl literature, you will find in both the original documents and the editions that have been made from them an orthography that is somewhat different from the one that you have become accustomed to during the use of this book. Recall that the uniform orthography adopted here (and used by many linguists) substantially agrees with the traditional manner of spelling but eliminates from it certain ambiguities and errors.

The traditional orthography is at once less exact, regularly leaves out significant elements and is applied erratically. In this appendix, you will find notes that will hopefully spare you any astonishment when you first come into contact with texts that follow the old orthograph and put you in a position to recognize the true phonetic structure of words where that orthography is uncertain or defective.

The information is correlated with the presentation of the phonology given in the Preliminary Lesson. In Table A.1 you will find, from left to right:

• the phonological unit (phoneme) between slashes

• the spelling used in this book

• any relevant discussion of the traditional writing, with examples (the traditional spelling comes first and then the “normalized” spelling used in this book follows in parentheses)