See also
Nāhuatl edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Classical Nahuatl | |
|---|---|
| Nāhuatlahtōlli | |
| Pronunciation | [naːwat͡ɬaʔˈtoːlːi] |
| Native to | Mexico |
| Region | Aztec Empire |
| Era | 16th century, after Conquest of Mexico |
Uto-Aztecan languages
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | nci |
| Glottolog | clas1250 |
Classical Nahuatl (also known simply as Aztec or Nahuatl) is any of the variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use today (other modern dialects descend more directly from other 16th-century variants). Although classified as an extinct language, [1] Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
Classical Nahuatl is one of the Nahuan languages within the Uto-Aztecan family. It is classified as a central dialect and is most closely related to the modern dialects of Nahuatl spoken in the valley of Mexico in colonial and modern times. It is probable that the Classical Nahuatl documented by 16th- and 17th-century written sources represents a particularly prestigious sociolect. That is to say, the variety of Nahuatl recorded in these documents is most likely to be more particularly representative of the speech of Aztec nobles ( pīpiltin ), while the commoners ( mācēhualtin ) spoke a somewhat different variety.
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i , iː | o , oː |
| Mid | e , eː | |
| Open | a , aː | |
| Labial | Dental | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | lateral | plain | labial | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive | p | t | k | kʷ | ʔ | ||
| Affricate | ts | tɬ | tʃ | ||||
| Fricative | s | ʃ | |||||
| Approximant | l | j | w | ||||
Stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable. The one exception is the vocative suffix (used by men) -é, which is added to the end of a word and is always stressed, e.g. Cuāuhtliquetzqui (a name, meaning "Eagle Warrior"), but Cuāuhtliquetzqué "O Cuauhtliquetzqui!"
When women use the vocative, the stress is shifted to the final syllable without adding any suffix. Oquichtli means "man", and oquichtlí means "O man!"
Maximally complex Nahuatl syllables are of the form CVC; [2] that is, there can be at most one consonant at the beginning and end of every syllable. In contrast, English, for example, allows up to three consonants syllable-initially and up to four consonants to occur at the end of syllables (e.g. strengths) (ngths = /ŋkθs/). [3] Consonant clusters are only allowed word-medially, Nahuatl uses processes of both epenthesis (usually of /i/) and deletion to deal with this constraint.
For such purposes, tl/tɬ/, like all other affricates, is treated as a single sound, and not all consonants can occur in both syllable-initial and syllable-final position.
The consonants /l/ and /w/ are devoiced in syllable-final position. Likewise, /j/ is also devoiced and merged into /ʃ/ in syllable-final position. [4]
At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly pictograms supplemented with a few ideograms. When needed, it also used syllabic equivalences[ citation needed ]; Diego Durán recorded how the tlacuilos could render a prayer in Latin using this system but it was difficult to use. The writing system was adequate for keeping such records as genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists, but it could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the Old World or the Maya civilization's script could.
The Spanish introduced the Latin script, which was then used to record a large body of Aztec prose and poetry, which somewhat diminished the devastating loss caused by the burning of thousands of Aztec codices by the Spanish authorities.
| Phoneme | IPA | Romanisation scheme | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michel Launey [5] | ||||||||
| a | [ a ] | a | ||||||
| e | [ e ] | e | ||||||
| i | [ i ] | i | ||||||
| o | [ o ] | o | ||||||
| u | [ u ] | o | ||||||
| a | [ aː ] | ā | ||||||
| e | [ eː ] | ē | ||||||
| i | [ iː ] | ī | ||||||
| o | [ oː ] | ō | ||||||
| u | [ uː ] | ō | ||||||
| p | [ p ] | p | ||||||
| t | [ t ] | t | ||||||
| k | [ k ] | qu (before i and e) c (in all other cases) | ||||||
| c | [ ts ] | tz | ||||||
| č | [ tʃ ] | ch | ||||||
| λ | [ tɬ ] | tl | ||||||
| kw | [ kʷ ] | cu (before vowels) uc (in all other cases) | ||||||
| m | [ m ] | m | ||||||
| n | [ n ] | n | ||||||
| s | [ s ] | c (before e and i) z (in all other cases) | ||||||
| š | [ ʃ ] | x | ||||||
| y | [ j ] | y | ||||||
| w | [ w ] | hu (before vowels) uh (in all other cases) | ||||||
| l | [ l ] | l | ||||||
| ll | [ lː ] | ll | ||||||
| ʼ | [ ʔ ] | ◌̀ (on the preceding vowel within word) ◌̂ (on the preceding vowel at the end of a word) | ||||||
| ʼ | [ h ] | ◌̀ (on the preceding vowel within word) ◌̂ (on the preceding vowel at the end of a word) | ||||||
Nahuatl literature is extensive (probably the most extensive of all Indigenous languages of the Americas), including a relatively large corpus of poetry (see also Nezahualcoyotl). The Huei tlamahuiçoltica is an early sample of literary Nahuatl.
A bilingual dictionary with Spanish, Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana , was first published in 1611 and is "the most important and most frequently reprinted Spanish work on Nahuatl," according to the World Digital Library. [6]
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Ōmeteōtl is a name used to refer to the pair of Aztec deities Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, also known as Tōnacātēcuhtli and Tonacacihuatl. Ōme translates as "two" or "dual" in Nahuatl and teōtl translates as "god". The existence of such a concept and its significance is a matter of dispute among scholars of Mesoamerican religion. Ometeotl was one as the first divinity, and Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl when the being became two to be able to reproduce all creation
In Aztec mythology, Tloquenahuaque, Tloque Nahuaque or Tloque Naoaque was one of the epithets of Tezcatlipoca. Miguel Leon Portilla argues that Tloque Nahuaque was also used as an epithet of Ometeotl, the hypothetical duality creator God of the Aztecs. Tloquenahuaque, also referred to as Tloque Nahuaque or Tloque Naoaque, is a creator god in Aztec mythology. Meso-Americans knew this god by other names as well, "Moyocoyani or Hunab Ku".
Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.
Since the early 16th century, Nahuatl has been written in an orthography in Latin script based on Spanish spelling conventions, with overall the same values for letters in both orthographies. Over the centuries, Latin script was utilized to record a large body of Nahuatl prose and poetry, which somewhat mitigated the devastating loss of the thousands of Aztec manuscripts that were burned by Spanish missionaries.
The Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family that have undergone a sound change, known as Whorf's law, that changed an original *t to before *a. Subsequently, some Nahuan languages have changed this to or back to, but it can still be seen that the language went through a stage. The best known Nahuan language is Nahuatl. Nahuatl is spoken by about 1.7 million Nahua peoples.
The grammar of Classical Nahuatl is agglutinative, head-marking, and makes extensive use of compounding, noun incorporation and derivation. That is, it can add many different prefixes and suffixes to a root until very long words are formed. Very long verbal forms or nouns created by incorporation, and accumulation of prefixes are common in literary works. New words can thus be easily created.
Horacio Carochi (1586–1666) was a Jesuit priest and grammarian who was born in Florence and died in New Spain. He is known for his grammar of the Classical Nahuatl language.
Nawat is a Nahuan language native to Central America. It is the southernmost extant member of the Uto-Aztecan family. It was spoken in several parts of present-day Central America before Spanish colonization, but now is mostly confined to western El Salvador. It has been on the verge of extinction in El Salvador, and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America. In 2012, a large number of new Nawat speakers started to appear. As of today, the language is currently going through a revitalization.
Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571 and still used by scholars working on Nahuatl texts in the tradition of the New Philology. He also wrote a bilingual confessional manual for priests who served in Nahuatl-speaking communities.
Pochutec is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahuan branch which was spoken in and around the town of Pochutla on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 1917 it was documented in a monograph by Franz Boas, who considered the language nearly extinct. In the 1970s another investigator found two speakers around Pochutla who still remembered a few of the words recorded by Boas.
Fray Ángel María Garibay Kintana was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest, philologist, linguist, historian, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, specifically of the Nahua peoples of the central Mexican highlands. He is particularly noted for his studies and translations of conquest-era primary source documents written in Classical Nahuatl, the lingua franca of Postclassic central Mexico and the then-dominant Aztec empire. Alongside his former student Miguel León-Portilla, Garibay ranks as one of the pre-eminent Mexican authorities on the Nahuatl language and its literary heritage, and as one who has made a significant contribution towards the promotion and preservation of the indigenous cultures and languages of Mexico.
The Arte de la lengua mexicana y castellana is a grammar of the Nahuatl language in Spanish by Alonso de Molina. It was published in Mexico in 1571, the same year as his monumental dictionary, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana.
The Arte de la lengua mexicana con la declaración de los adverbios della is a grammar of the Nahuatl language in Spanish by Jesuit grammarian Horacio Carochi. This classic work on the Classical Nahuatl language is now considered by linguists to be the finest and most useful of the many extant early grammars of Nahuatl.
Andrés de Olmos was a Spanish Franciscan priest and grammarian and ethno-historian of Mexico's indigenous languages and peoples. He was born in Oña, Burgos, Spain and died in Tampico in New Spain. He is best known for his grammar, the first in the New World, of the Classical Nahuatl language.
Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana is a bilingual dictionary of Spanish and Nahuatl by Alonso de Molina, first published in 1555 originally entitled Aquí comiença un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana, edited by Juan Pablos. It was the first dictionary to be published in the New World. However the most relevant and most famous edition was the one made in 1571, edited by Antonio de Spinosa, which then came to be named Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana. This new edition included the Nahuatl-to-Spanish section that the original didn't.
Arthur James Outram Anderson was an American anthropologist specializing in Aztec culture and translator of the Nahuatl language.
Nahuatl, Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 1.7 million Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
Giovanni Paoli, better known as Juan Pablos, a native of Lombardy, was the first documented printer in the Americas when he started printing in Mexico in 1539.
Rincón Zapotec is a Zapotec language of Oaxaca, Mexico.
The history of the Nahuatl, Aztec or Mexicano language can be traced back to the time when Teotihuacan flourished. From the 4th century AD to the present, the journey and development of the language and its dialect varieties have gone through a large number of periods and processes, the language being used by various peoples, civilizations and states throughout the history of the cultural area of Mesoamerica.
Media related to Classical Nahuatl language at Wikimedia Commons