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Nahuatl

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Nahuatl is a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan, or Nahuan, branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is indigenous to Mesoamerica and is spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, mostly in Central Mexico.

Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD. At the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century it was the language of the Aztecs, who dominated central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology. The expansion and influence of the Aztec Empire led to the dialect spoken by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan becoming a prestige language throughout Mesoamerica in this period. With the introduction of the Latin Alphabet, Nahuatl also became a literary language and many chronicles, grammars, works of poetry, administrative documents and codices were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan dialect has been labelled Classical Nahuatl and is among the most-studied and best-documented languages of the Americas.

Today Nahuan dialects are spoken in scattered communities mostly in rural areas. There are considerable differences between dialects and some are mutually unintelligible. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence from Spanish. No modern dialects are identical to Classical Nahuatl, but those spoken in and around the Valley of Mexico are generally more closely related to it than those on the periphery. Under the Mexican "Law of Linguistic Rights" (ley general de derechos lingüisticos de los pueblos indígenas), Nahuatl is recognized as a "national language" with the same status as Spanish and Mexico's other recognized indigenous languages.

Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination, allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affixes. Nahuatl has been influenced by other Mesoamerican languages through centuries of coexistence, becoming part of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Many words from Nahuatl have been borrowed into Spanish and further on into hundreds of other languages. These are mostly words for concepts indigenous to central Mexico which the Spanish heard mentioned for the first time by their Nahuatl names. English words of Nahuatl origin include "tomato", "avocado" and "chocolate".

History

Precolumbian Period

Archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence suggest that the speakers of Nahuatl languages originally came from the northern Mexican deserts and migrated into central Mexico in several waves. Before the speakers of Nahuan languages entered Mesoamerica they probably temporarily resided in northwestern Mexico alongside the Coracholan languages (Cora and Huichol). According to the current understanding of Nahuatl prehistory, proto-Nahuatl speakers entered the Mesoamerican region sometime around AD 500. Here they came into contact with speakers of Mayan, Oto-Manguean and Mixe-Zoquean languages who had coexisted for millennia, and whose languages had converged to form the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. The earlier nomadic Nahuas adopted many aspects of Mesoamerican culture, which caused proto-Nahuatl to develop new traits similar to the other Mesoamerican languages. Those traits which are common to all Nahuatl varieties, but are absent in other Uto-Aztecan languages outside of Mesoamerica, are held to date from this period. Examples of such adopted traits include the use of relational nouns, the appearance of calques, or loan translations, and a form of possessive construction typical of Mesoamerican languages.

The first group to split from the main group of proto-Nahuatl speakers were the Pochutec, who went on to settle on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, possibly as early as AD 400. From the 7th century Nahuan speakers quickly rose to power in central Mexico, where they expanded into areas earlier occupied by speakers of Oto-Manguean, Totonacan and Huastec languages. Some speakers of Nahuan migrated further southwards along the Central American isthmus, reaching as far as El Salvador and Panama. These groups would be ancestral to speakers of modern Pipil. The earliest migrations are thought to correspond to the modern peripheral dialects some of which are relatively conservative and do not display much influence from the central dialects.

Around AD 1000, Nahuatl speakers were dominant in the Valley of Mexico and far beyond, and migrations kept coming in from the north. One of the last of these migrations to arrive in the valley settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco and proceeded to subjugate the surrounding tribes. This group were the Mexica, who over the course of the next three centuries founded an empire based from Tenochtitlan, their island capital. Their political and linguistic influence came to reach well into Central America and it is well documented that among several non-Nahuan ethnic groups, such as the K'iche' Maya, Nahuatl became a prestige language used for long distance trade and spoken by the elite groups.

Colonial period

With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519 the tables turned for the Nahuatl language and a new language became dominant. However because the Spanish allied themselves with the Nahuatl speakers from Tlaxcala and later with the conquered Aztecs, the Nahuatl language continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest, when Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. The Jesuit missions in northern Mexico, and the US southwest often included a barrio of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission, for example Tlaxcaltecs founded the city of Saltillo in Coahuila. Spanish conquests to the south of Mexico often included Tlaxcatecs or other Nahuatl speaking allies.

As a part of their missionary efforts, members of various monastic orders (principally Fransciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits) introduced the Latin alphabet to the Nahuas, who were eager to learn to read and write both in Spanish and in their own language. Within the first twenty years after the Spanish arrival, texts were being prepared in the Nahuatl language written in Latin characters. Also during this time institutions of learning were founded, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, inaugurated in 1536, which taught both indigenous and classical European languages to both Indians and priests. Missionary grammarians undertook the writing of grammars of indigenous languages for use by priests. The first Nahuatl grammar, written by Andrés de Olmos, was published in 1547, three years before the first French grammar. By 1645 a further four had been published: one by Alonso de Molina in 1571, one by Antonio del Rincón in 1595, one by Diego de Guzman in 1642, and in 1645, what is today considered the most important Nahuatl grammar, that of Horacio Carochi.

In 1570 Philip II of Spain decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain in order to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. This led to the Spanish missionaries teaching Nahuatl to Indians who were native speakers of other indigenous languages as far south as Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Nahuatl was used as a literary language, and a large corpus of texts from that period is in existence today. Texts from this period include histories, chronicles, poetry, theatrical works, Christian canonical works, ethnographic description and a wide variety of administrative and mundane documents. The Spanish permitted a great deal of autonomy in the local administration of indigenous towns during this period, and in many Nahuatl speaking towns Nahuatl was the de facto administrative language both in writing and speech. A large body of Nahuatl literature was composed during this period, including the Florentine Codex, a 12-volume compendium of Aztec culture compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún; Crónica Mexicayotl, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc; Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Alonso de Molina; and the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, a description in Nahuatl of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages were composed throughout the colonial period, but their quality was highest in the initial period and declined towards the ends of the 18th century. In practice, the friars found that learning all the indigenous languages was impossible and began to focus on Nahuatl. For a period the linguistic situation in Mesoamerica remained relatively stable, but in 1696 Charles II passed a counter-decree banning the use of any language other than Spanish throughout the Spanish Empire. In 1770 a decree with the avowed purpose of eliminating the indigenous languages, issued by the Royal Cedula, dealt a terminal blow to Nahuatl as a literary language.

Modern period

Throughout the modern period the situation of indigenous languages has grown increasingly precarious, and the numbers of speakers of virtually all indigenous languages have dwindled. Although the absolute number of Nahuatl speakers has actually risen over the past century, indigenous populations have become increasingly marginalized in Mexican society. In 1895, Nahuatl was spoken by over 5% of the Mexican population. By 2000, this proportion had fallen to 1.49%. Given the process of marginalization combined with the trend of migration to urban areas and to the United States, some linguists are warning of impending language death. At present Nahuatl is mostly spoken in rural areas by an impoverished class of indigenous subsistence agriculturists. Since the early 20th century and until recently, educational policies in Mexico have focused on the "hispanification" of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of Nahuatl. The result has been that today no group of Nahuatl speakers has general literacy in Nahuatl, while their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average. Even so, Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people, of whom around 10% are monolingual. Nahuatl as a whole is not imminently endangered, but some of its dialects are severely endangered and others have become extinct within the last few decades of the 20th century.

More recent government policy has encouraged the establishment of bilingual schools where at least some of the instruction is in Nahuatl. Although there are still problems, such as lack of textbooks in the Nahuatl of particular regions, or teachers from one dialect assigned to teach children in another region, there is at least some movement towards more widespread literacy in Nahuatl and use of Nahuatl in written form. The Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law regarding the Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples"), promulgated on 14 March 2003, recognizes all indigenous languages of Mexico, including Nahuatl, as "national languages" and gives indigenous people the right to use them in all spheres of public and private life. Government-sponsored broadcasting in Nahuatl is also carried by the CDI's radio stations.

Geographic distribution

Speakers over 5 years of age in the ten states with most speakers (2000 census). Absolute and relative numbers.
Region	Totals	Percentages
Federal District	37,450	0.44%
Guerrero	136,681	4.44%
Hidalgo	221,684	9.92%
Mexico (state)	55,802	0.43%
Morelos	18,656	1.20%
Oaxaca	10,979	0.32%
Puebla	416,968	8.21%
San Luis Potosí	138,523	6.02%
Tlaxcala	23,737	2.47%
Veracruz	338,324	4.90%
Rest of Mexico	50,132	0.10%
Total:	1,448,937	1.49%

A range of Nahuatl dialects are currently spoken in an area stretching from the northern Mexican state of Durango to Veracruz in the south. Pipil, the southernmost Nahuan language, is spoken in El Salvador by a small number of speakers. Another Nahuan language, Pochutec, was spoken on the coast of Oaxaca until circa 1930.

Across Mexico, Nahuatl is spoken by an estimated 1.44 million people, including some 190,000 who are monolingual. The state of Guerrero has the highest ratio of monolingual Nahuatl speakers, calculated at 24.8% based on 2000 census figures. The proportion of monolinguals for most other states is less than 5%.

The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, and Guerrero. Significant populations are also found in México State, Morelos, and the Mexican Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán and Durango. Nahuatl was formerly spoken in the states of Jalisco and Colima, where it became extinct during the 20th century. As a result of internal migrations within the country, all Mexican states today have some isolated pockets and groups of Nahuatl speakers. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl-speaking communities, particularly in New York and California.

Classification

The terminology used to describe varieties of spoken Nahuatl is inconsistently applied. Many terms are used for differing meanings, or the same groupings go under several names. Sometimes older terms are substituted with newer terms or the speakers' own name for their specific variety. The word Nahuatl is itself a Nahuatl word, probably derived from the word nāwatlahtolli ("clear language"). The language was formerly called "Aztec" because it was spoken by the Aztecs, who however didn't call themselves Aztecs but mexica, and their language mexicacopa. Nowadays the term "Aztec" is rarely used for modern Nahuan languages, but "Aztecan" is used for the Nahuatl languages and dialects when described as the second constituent part of the Uto-Aztecan language family. (This group is also often called "Nahuan".) "General Aztec" is used by some linguists to refer to the Aztecan languages excluding Pochutec.

The speakers of Nahuatl themselves often refer to their language as either mexicano or a word derived from mācehualli, the Nahuatl word for "commoner". One example of the latter is the case for Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali. The Pipil of El Salvador do not call their own language "Pipil", as most linguists do, but rather nawat. The Nahuas of Durango call their language mexicanero. Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec call their language mela'tajtol ("the straight language"). Some speech communities also use "Nahuatl" as the name for their language although this seems to be a recent innovation. Linguists commonly identify localized dialects of Nahuatl by adding as a qualifier the name of the village or area where that variety is spoken (for example, "Nahuatl of Acaxochitlan").

Genealogy

The Nahuatl languages belong to the Uto-Aztecan language family which is one of the largest and best studied language families of the Americas. The Nahuatl languages (including Pipil and the extinct Pochutec) are the only members of the "Aztecan" or "Nahuan" subgroup of Uto-Aztecan. The subgroupings of the Nahuan dialects and languages have been the subject of discussions among linguists for the past fifty years. Early classifications rested on the assumption that the basic division of Nahuan languages lay between the languages which had the /tl/ sound and others which had /t/ . This assumption was refuted by Lyle Campbell and Ronald Langacker in 1978, who showed that all the Aztecan languages had shared the development of */t/ to /tl/ but that subsequently some dialects had changed the /tl/ back to /t/ or /l/ .

The most recent authoritative classifications of the Nahuan languages have been done by Yolanda Lastra de Suárez and by Una Canger. Both of these approaches were based on dialectological research that focussed on delineating isoglosses, or linguistic boundaries, based on differences in phonology, grammar and vocabulary. Both classifications define the basic split to be that between central and peripheral dialects. The hypothesis presented is that the speakers of peripheral dialects were the first Nahuatl speakers to arrive in Mesoamerica, and that they therefore preserve some slightly archaic features. The speakers of the central dialects who arrived later, among them the Aztecs, introduced linguistic innovations that then spread outwards from the Valley of Mexico aided by the expansion of Aztec hegemony and prestige. The two classifications are largely similar, but differ in their treatment of the dialects from the region of La Huasteca. Canger places these in the central group, while Lastra de Suárez places them in a separate group. The classification below is based on that of Lastra de Suárez, combined with Lyle Campbell's classification for the higher-level groupings.

Uto-Aztecan 5000 BP^*

Shoshonean (a.k.a. Northern Uto-Aztecan)
Sonoran^**
Aztecan 2000 BP (a.k.a. Nahuan)

Pochutec † Coast of Oaxaca
General Aztec (a.k.a. Nahuatl)

Western periphery Dialects of Durango (Mexicanero), Michoacan, Western Mexico state, extinct dialects of Colima and Nayarit
Eastern Periphery Pipil language and dialects of Sierra de Puebla, southern Veracruz and Tabasco (isthmus dialects)
Huasteca Dialects of Northern Puebla, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and Northern Veracruz
Center Dialects of central Puebla, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Mexico state, central and southern Guerrero

^*Estimated split date by glottochronology (BP = years Before Present).

^**Some scholars continue to classify Aztecan and Sonoran together under a separate group (called variously "Sonoran", "Mexican", or "Southern Uto-Aztecan"). There is increasing evidence that whatever degree of additional resemblance there might be between Aztecan and Sonoran when compared with Shoshonean is probably due to proximity contact, rather than to a common immediate parent stock other than Uto-Aztecan.

Phonology

Historical changes

Nahuan is defined as a subgroup of Uto-Aztecan by having undergone a number of shared changes from the Uto-Aztecan proto-language (PUA) since the original speakers of Nahuan split from the main Uto-Aztecan group. These changes shared by all Nahuan languages are the basis for the reconstruction of an intermediate stage called Proto-Nahuan (PN) from which the modern Nahuan languages have since developed.

The table below shows the phonemic inventory of Classical Nahuatl, as an example of a typical Nahuan language. Many modern dialects have undergone changes from proto-Nahuan that have resulted in different phonemic inventories. For example some dialects do not have the /t͡ɬ/ phoneme that is so common in classical Nahuatl, but have instead changed it into /t/ as it has happened in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl, Mexicanero and Pipil or into /l/ as it has happened in Nahuatl of Pómaro Michoacan. Many dialects no longer distinguish between short and long vowels. Some have introduced completely new vowel qualities to compensate for this, this is the case Tetelcingo Nahuatl, and others developed a pitch accent as is the case for Nahuatl of Oapan, Guerrero. Many modern dialects have also introduced new phonemes such as under influence from Spanish.

Sounds

The consonants of classical Nahuatl
	Labial	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labio- velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n
Plosive	p	t			k	kʷ	ʔ (h)*
Affricate		t͡ɬ / t͡s	t͡ʃ
Fricative		s	ʃ
Approximant		l		j		w

The vowels of classical Nahuatl
	Front		Central		Back
	long	short	long	short	long	short
Close	iː	i
Mid	eː	e			oː	o
Open			aː	a

* The glottal phoneme (called the "saltillo") only occurs after vowels. In many modern dialects it is realized as an [h], but in classical Nahuatl and in other modern dialects it is a glottal stop [ʔ].

Nahuatl generally has stress on the penultimate syllable of a word, but some varieties have changed this. Mexicanero Nahuat from Durango has lost many unstressed syllable and now has phonemic stress, and Pochutec had the accent on the last syllable of the word.

Grammar

The Nahuatl languages are agglutinative, polysynthetic languages that make extensive use of compounding, incorporation and derivation. That is, they can add many different prefixes and suffixes to a root until very long words are formed - and a single word can constitute an entire sentence.

The following verb show how the verb is marked for subject, patient, object, and direct object:

ni-mit͡s-te:-t͡la-maki:-lti:-s

I-you-him-it-give-CAUSATIVE-FUTURE

"I shall make somebody give it to you (Classical Nahuatl)

In the early 20th Century Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed that the typology of Nahuatl is oligosynthetic, meaning that the language only has a minimal number of morphemes that it uses to construct all of its words - However the concept of oligosynthesis, in Nahuatl or other languages, never achieved support as a valid typological category.

Nouns

The Nahuatl noun is relatively complex with some inflectional categories It is only obligatorily inflected for number and possession. Another important morphological processes affecting the noun is the formation of compounds consisting of several nominal roots. Nahuatl has no grammatical gender but Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns.

Nahuatl distinguishes only singular and plural forms of nouns. Plural forms of nouns are normally formed by adding a plural suffix, although some words form irregular plurals for example by using reduplication. In Classical Nahuatl only animate nouns could take a plural form, whereas all inanimate nouns were uncountable (like the words "bread" and "money" are uncountable in English). Nowadays many dialects do not have this distinction and allow all nouns to be pluralized. Singular noun:

kojo-t͡l

coyote-ABSOLUTIVE

"coyote" (Classical Nahuatl)

Plural animate noun:

kojo-meh

coyote-PLURAL

"coyotes" (Classical Nahuatl)

Nahuatl distinguishes three persons - both in the singular and plural numbers. Some modern dialects, notably the Isthmus-Mecayapan variety has introduced a distinction between inclusive (I/we and you) and exclusive (we but not you) forms of the first person plural:

First person plural pronoun in Classical Nahuatl:

tehwa:ntin "we"

First person plural pronouns in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat:

nejamēn ([nehame:n]) "We but not you"

tejamēn ([tehame:n]) "We, I and you (and others)

Nahuatl distinguishes between possessed and unpossessed forms of nouns. Classical Nahuatl and many modern dialects employ an absolutive suffix to nouns to signal that it is not possessed. In all dialects possessed nouns take a prefix agreeing with number and person of its possessor. Absolutive noun:

kal-li

house-ABSOLUTIVE

"house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Possessed noun:

no-kal

my-house

"my house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Nahuatl does not have actual grammatical case but instead uses a construction called a relational noun to describe spatial relations. Relational nouns can also be used in compounds with other nouns forming locative constructions that can be understood as a kind of case marker. Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects also use a special locative suffix which can be described as a locative case. Most modern dialects have incorporated prepositions from Spanish that are competing with or that have completely replaced relational nouns. Use of relational noun:

its-in house-ABSOLUTIVE

"in the house (Classical Nahuatl)

Use of locative suffix:

kal-pan

house-in

"in the house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Verbs

The Nahuatl verb is quite complex and inflects many grammatical categories. The verb is composed of a root which can take both prefixes and suffixes. The person of the subject, and person and number of the object and indirect object is expressed by agreement prefixes, whereas tense, aspect, mood and subject number is expressed by suffixes.

Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish present, past and future tenses and perfective and imperfective aspects. Some varieties have progressive or habitual aspects. As for moods all dialects distinguish indicative and imperative moods and some also have optative and vetative moods.

Most Nahuatl varieties have a number of ways to alter the valency of a verb. Classical Nahuatl had a passive voice, but this is not found in most modern varieties. However the applicative and causative voices are found in many modern dialects. Many Nahuatl varieties also allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.

The following verbal form has two verbal roots and is inflected for causative voice and both a direct and indirect object:

ni-kin-t͡la-kwa-lti:-s-neki

I-them-something-eat-CAUSATIVE-FUTURE-want

"I want to feed them" (Classical Nahuatl)

Some Nahuatl varieties, notably Classical Nahuatl, can inflect the verb to show the direction of the verbal action going away from or towards the speaker. Some also have specific inflectional categories showing purpose and direction "to go in order to" or "to come in order to".

Classical Nahuatl and many modern dialects have grammaticalised ways to express politeness towards addressees or even towards people or things that are being mentioned, by using special verb forms and special "honorific suffixes".

Familiar verbal form:

ti-mo-t͡la:lo-a

you-yourself-run-PRESENT

"you run"(Classical Nahuatl)

Honorific verbal form:

ti-mo-t͡la:lo-t͡sino-a

you-yourself-run-HONORIFIC-PRESENT

"You run"(said with respect) (Classical Nahuatl)

Syntax

The syntax of modern and Classical Nahuatl has been a topic of numerous studies. Some linguists, notably Mark Baker, have argued that Nahuatl has the properties of a non-configurational language which means that in Nahuatl word order is basically free. Others have argued that basic word order in nahuatl is Subject Verb Object, but the widest accepted conclusion is that Nahuatl has a basic verb initial word order but with extensive freedom for variation.

Some Nahuatl scholars such as Michel Launey and J. Richard Andrews have argued that Nahuatl syntax is best characterised by what Launey calls "omnipredicativity", meaning that any noun or verb in the language is in fact a full predicative sentence.

Ethnography of speaking

The Aztecs distinguished between the at least two social registers of language: the language of commoners (macehuallahtolli) and the language of the nobility (tecpillahtolli). The latter was marked by the use of a distinct rhetorical style. Since mostly the higher social classes achieved literacy, most existing documents, both prose and poetry, were written in this style. An important feature of this high rhetorical style of formal oratory was the use of parallelism: The orator would structure his speech in couplets consisting of two parallel phrases. For example:

ye maca timiquican

"May we not die"

ye maca tipolihuican

"May we not perish"

Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphorical reading. Classical Nahuatl was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, and a number of the primary-source language commentaries such as Sahagún's Florentine Codex and Andrés de Olmos' Arte describe and give examples of this particular rhetoric trait. Such difrasismos include:

in xochitl, in cuicatl

"The flower, the song" - meaning "poetry

in cuitlapilli, in atlapalli

"the tail, the wing" - meaning "the common people

in toptli, in petlacalli

"the chest, the box" meaning "something secret

in yollohtli, in eztli

"the heart, the blood" - meaning "cacao"

in iztlactli, in tenqualactli

"the drool, the spittle" - meaning "lies"

Vocabulary

Many Nahuatl words have been borrowed into the Spanish language, most of which are terms designating things indigenous to the American continent. Some of these loans are restricted to Mexican or Central American Spanish, but others have entered all the varieties of Spanish in the world and a number of them, such as "chocolate", "tomato" and "avocado" have made their way into many other languages via Spanish.

Likewise a number of English words have been borrowed from Nahuatl through Spanish. Two of the most prominent are undoubtedly chocolate and tomato (from Nahuatl tomatl). Other common words such as coyote (from Nahuatl coyotl), avocado (from Nahuatl ahuacatl) and chile or chili (from Nahuatl chilli). The word chicle is also derived from Nahuatl tzictli "sticky stuff, chicle". Some other English words from Nahuatl are: Aztec, (from aztecatl); cacao (from Nahuatl cacahuatl 'shell, rind'); ocelot (from ocelotl). In Mexico many words for common everyday concepts attest to the close contact between Spanish and Nahuatl, so many in fact that entire dictionaries of "mexicanismos" (words particular to Mexican Spanish) have been published tracing Nahuatl etymologies, as well as Spanish words with origins in other indigenous languages. Many well-known toponym also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (from the Nahuatl word for the Aztec capital mexihco) and Guatemala (from the word cuauhtēmallan).

Writing and literature

Writing

Precolumbian Aztec writing used three basic means of expression: First of all it used the technique of direct representations or pictures of that which was to be expressed. Secondly it used ideograms or logograms symbolically representing the thing or concept that was to be represented. And lasty to some degree it used phonetic transcription, employing logograms meant to represent only the sound of a given word, to be interpreted according to the rebus principle. This writing system was adequate for keeping such records as genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists, but could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the old world or that of the Maya civilization could. Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told; the elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for teaching, and long texts were memorized.

The Spanish introduced the Roman script, which was then utilized to record a large body of Aztec prose, poetry and mundane documentation such as testaments, administrative documents, legal letters etc. In a matter of decades pictorial writing was completely replaced with the Latin alphabet. No standardized Latin orthography was developed for Nahuatl, and there never arose a consensus about how to represent many of the sounds that Nahuatl has but which doesn't exist in Spanish such as long vowels and the glottal stop. The orthography that most accurately represented the phonemes of Nahuatl was developed in the 17th century by the jesuit monk Horacio Carochi. Carochi's orthography used two different accents: a macron to represent long vowels and a grave for the saltillo, and sometimes an accute accent for short vowels. But his orthography never achieved a wide following outside of the jesuit community.

When Nahuatl became the subject of linguistic studies in the 20th century, linguists acknowledged the need to represent all the phonemes of the language and several practical orthographies were developed to transcribe the language, many using the Americanist transcription system. With the Creation of Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas in Mexico in 2004, new attempts to create standardized orthographies for the different dialects were assumed, but to this day there is no single official orthography for Nahuatl. Apart from the issue of dialectal differences, some of the major issues in the transcription of Nahuatl are:

whether or not to follow Spanish orthographic practice and write /k/ with c and qu, /kʷ/ with cu, /s/ with c/z or s, and /w/ with hu or u.
how to write the "saltillo" phoneme (in some dialects pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ] and in others as an [h]), which has been spelled with j, h, ' (apostrophe), or a grave accent on the preceding vowel, but which traditionally has often been omitted in writing.
whether and how to represent vowel length, e.g. by double vowels or by the use of macrons.

Literature

Nahuatl is unique among the languages of the Americas in that there is a large body of literature written in it, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Nahuatl literature encompasses a wide array of genres and styles, and it has been composed under many different circumstances. It appears that the pre-conquest Nahua had a distinction much like the European distinction between "prose" and "poetry" the first they called tlahtolli "speech" and the second cuicatl "song

Nahuatl tlahtolli prose has been preserved in different forms. Annals and chronicles recount history, normally seen from the perspective of a single altepetl, and these often myx myth with real events. Important works in this genre are the ones from Chalco by Chimalpahin, from Tlaxcala by Diego Muñoz Camargo, from Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and those of Texcoco by Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl. Many annals recount history year by year and are normally written by anonymous authors, sometimes building on pre-Columbian pictorial year counts exist, such as the Cuauhtitlan and the Annals of Tlatelolco. Purely mythological narratives are also found, like the "Legend of the Five Suns", the Aztec creation myth recounted in Codex Chimalpopoca.

One of the most important prose works in Nahuatl is the twelve volume Florentine Codex compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with the help of a number of Nahua informants. Sahagún created an enormous ethnographic description of the Nahua written in Nahuatl and Spanish in side by side translations, and thoroughly illustrated with colour plates drawn by indigenous painters. It covers topics such as Aztec history, material culture, social organization, religion and ceremonial life, rhetorical style and metaphors. And its twelfth book gives an indigenous perspective on the conquest itself. Sahagún further more made a point of trying to document the richness of the Nahuatl language. Sahagún himself stated that:

This work is like a dragnet to bring to light all the words of this language with their exact and metaphorical meanings, and all their ways of speaking, and most of their practices good and evil.

Nahuatl poetry is preserved in principally two sources: the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los Señores de Nueva España, both collections of Aztec songs written down in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some songs may have been preserved through oral tradition from pre-conquest times until the time of their writing, for example the songs attributed to the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl. Lockhart & Karttunen (1980) identify more than four distinct styles of songs, e.g. the icnocuicatl ("sad song"), the xopancuicatl ("song of spring"), melahuaccuicatl ("plain song") and yaocuicatl ("song of war"), each with distinct stylistic traits. Aztec poetry makes rich use of metaphoric imagery and themes and are lamentation of the brevity of human existence, the celebration of valiant warriors who die in battle, and the appreciation of the beauty of life.

Notes

Bibliography

External links

Ethnologue Náhuatl dialects
Náhuatl Learning Resource List, by Ricardo J. Salvador
Nahuatl (Aztec) family, SIL-Mexico, with subsites on some specific variants
Náhuatl-French dictionary Includes basic grammar
Books at [[Project Gutenberg] in Nahuatl]

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