Frances Esther Karttunen (born 1942), [1] also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, [2] is an American academic linguist, historian and author.
She received her BA in 1964 from Harvard and her PhD in 1970 from Indiana University Bloomington, with a dissertation entitled Problems in Finnish Phonology. [3] [4] Most of her academic career was spent in association with the University of Texas at Austin, [5] where she held researcher and lecturer positions for over 30 years, until her retirement in 2000, as senior university research scientist at the Linguistics Research Center. [6]
In her linguistics career Karttunen has specialised in the study of Mesoamerican languages such as Mayan but in particular Nahuatl, on which topic she has authored seven books and numerous academic papers. She has also written about endangered languages, linguistic diversity and language translation. Early in her career Karttunen also produced several studies of Finnish phonology and syntax, including her 1970 dissertation.
As a historian Karttunen has published research in areas such as historical Mesoamerican literature, colonial-era Aztec and Nahua history, and the social organizations, socio-political concerns and literacy rates of indigenous peoples of Mexico. Karttunen has also written and lectured about the local history of Nantucket. [7]
Her 1976 publication Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period, with James Lockhart, [8] is a foundational text for the New Philology. She followed this by an article on Nahua literacy, showing how the Mesoamerican tradition of pictorial writing then transitioned to alphabetic writing in Latin letters by local-level notaries in a self-perpetuating tradition. [9] Her 1997 article, "Rethinking Malinche", on La Malinche, known in the colonial era as Doña Marina, is a significant revisionist take on the choices that Cortés' cultural translator and consort faced and took. [10]
She also published An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl [11] and several iterations of a Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar, culminating in the 1994 edition (with linguist R. Joe Campbell). [12]
She was married to historian Alfred W. Crosby. [13] [14]
Marina or Malintzin, more popularly known as La Malinche, a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521), by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519 by the natives of Tabasco. Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to his first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos in New Spain.
The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Aztec culture was organized into city-states (altepetl), some of which joined to form alliances, political confederations, or empires. The Aztec Empire was a confederation of three city-states established in 1427: Tenochtitlan, city-state of the Mexica or Tenochca, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, previously part of the Tepanec empire, whose dominant power was Azcapotzalco. Although the term Aztecs is often narrowly restricted to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, it is also broadly used to refer to Nahua polities or peoples of central Mexico in the prehispanic era, as well as the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821). The definitions of Aztec and Aztecs have long been the topic of scholarly discussion ever since German scientist Alexander von Humboldt established its common usage in the early 19th century.
The Nahuas are a group of the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and El Salvador. They are a Mesoamerican ethnicity. The Mexica (Aztecs) are of Nahua ethnicity, as are their historical enemies, the Tlaxcallans (Tlaxcaltecs), and the Toltecs which predated both groups are often thought to have been as well. However, in the pre-Columbian period Nahuas were subdivided into many groups that did not necessarily share a common identity.
Chichimeca is the name that the Nahua peoples of Mexico generically applied to nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who were established in present-day Bajío region of Mexico. Chichimeca carried the meaning as the Roman term "barbarian" that described Germanic tribes. The name, with its pejorative sense, was adopted by the Spanish Empire. In the words of scholar Charlotte M. Gradie, "for the Spanish, the Chichimecas were a wild, nomadic people who lived north of the Valley of Mexico. They had no fixed dwelling places, lived by hunting, wore little clothes and fiercely resisted foreign intrusion into their territory, which happened to contain silver mines the Spanish wished to exploit." Gradie noted that Chichimeca was used as a broad and generalizing term by outsiders, writing, "[it] was used by both Spanish and Nahuatl speakers to refer collectively to many different people who exhibited a wide range of cultural development from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists with sophisticated political organizations." They practiced animal sacrifice, and they were feared for their expertise and brutality in war.
Classical 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. Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
La Gran Chichimeca was a term used by the Spanish conquistadores of the 16th century to refer to an area of the northern central Mexican altiplano (plateau), a territory which today is encompassed by the modern Mexican states of Jalisco, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Zacatecas. They derived the term from the Aztec who referred to the nomadic tribes of the area as “chichimeca”.
The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Copenhagen University, the Harald.
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.
Arthur James Outram Anderson was an American anthropologist specializing in Aztec culture and translator of the Nahuatl language.
The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico is a book by Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla, translating selections of Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. It was first published in Spanish in 1959, and in English in 1962. The most recent English edition was published in 2007 (ISBN 978-0807055007).
Antonio Valeriano was a colonial Mexican, Nahua scholar and politician. He was a collaborator with fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation of the twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, He served as judge-governor of both his home, Azcapotzalco, and of Tenochtitlan, in Spanish colonial New Spain.
The Cantares Mexicanos is the name given to a manuscript collection of Nahuatl songs or poems recorded in the 16th century. The 91 songs of the Cantares form the largest Nahuatl song collection, containing over half of all known traditional Nahuatl songs. It is currently located in the National Library of Mexico in Mexico City. A description is found in the census of prose manuscripts in the native tradition in the Handbook of Middle American Indians.
New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review.
James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977.
Louise M. Burkhart is an American academic ethnohistorian and anthropologist, noted as a scholar of early colonial Mesoamerican literature. In particular, her published research has a focus on aspects of the religious beliefs and practices of Nahuatl-speakers in central Mexico. Her work examines the historical documentation from the time of the Spanish Conquest and the subsequent era of colonial Mexico, and studies the continuities and transformations of indigenous Nahua communities and culture. Burkhart has written extensively on colonial Nahuatl drama, folklore, poetry and catechistic texts, translating a number of these documents from the original Nahuatl with commentaries and historical interpretations and notes. She has also published research on the aesthetics and iconography of pre-Columbian and Indochristian art, Nahuatl linguistics, and the rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe cult within Mexican Roman Catholicism.
Lisa Sousa is an American academic historian active in the field of Latin American studies. A specialist in the colonial-era history of Latin America and of Colonial Mexico in particular, Sousa is noted for her research, commentary, and translations of colonial Mesoamerican literature and Nahuatl-language historical texts. She has also published research on historical and contemporary indigenous peoples in Mexico, the roles of women in indigenous societies and cultural definitions of gender. Sousa is a full professor in the History Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
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.