Nahuatl language

“ Under the names Chontalli and Popoluca, both Nahuatl words indicating “foreigners,” ethnographers have included tribes of wholly diverse lineage. In (32) I have shown that some are Tzentals, others Tequistlatecas, Ulvas, Mixes, Zapotecs, Nahuas, Lencas and Cakchiquels, thus doing away with the confusion introduced by these inappropriate ethnic terms.
No. (33) is an article for the use of students of the Nahuatl language, mentioning the principal grammars, dictionaries and text-books which are available. ”

“ This imaginary situation parallels the actual one in American linguistics. Not a single ancient form of speech has been preserved. Many living ones are inadequately known. The fact that some enthusiast has compiled a grammar of Nahuatl or Quechua or Eskimo does not necessarily mean that he has dissected out its whole structure. A book devoted to a language may be as superficial as it looks learned. And the man who really knew Nahuatl has usually concerned himself very little with Quechua. ”

“ The Nahuatl, Mexican or Aztec language was spoken extensively throughout Mexico and Central America, and every tribe who used it could boast of a degree of culture considerably above that of any of the Algonkin communities. Such being the case, it is rather surprising to note how extremely poor in comparison is the Nahuatl in independent radicals denoting love or affection. ”

“ The native languages furnish strong indications that, in ordinary tribal life, the separation of the sexes must have been generally enforced from remote antiquity and that male and female communities existed in various portions of the continent. It is well known that, to this day, the Nahuatl tongue spoken by the men is different from that spoken by the women, and that the same duality of language prevails among other American tribes. ”

“ Nor in the Nahuatl language—although its very name is derived from it58-*—does the radical na appear in its simplicity and true significance. To the Nahuas, also, it must have been a loan.
It is true that de la Serna derives the Mexican naualli, a sorcerer, from the verb nahualtia, to mask or disguise oneself, “because a naualli is one who masks or disguises himself under the form of some lower animal, which is his nagual;”58-† but it is altogether likely that nahualtia derived its meaning from the custom of the medicine men to wear masks during their ceremonies. ”

“ The language numbered about sixteen dialects, none very remote from the parent stem, which linguists identify as the Maya proper of the Yucatecan peninsula. While there are a number of verbal similarities between Maya and Nahuatl, the radicals of the two idioms and their grammatical structure are widely asunder. The Nahuatl is an excessively pliable, polysyllabic and highly synthetic tongue; the Maya is rigid, its words short, of one or two syllables generally, and is scarcely more synthetic than French. ”

“ Some of them are not true elementary sounds; they cannot stand alone, but must always have another consonant associated with them. Thus, the labial B is common in Guarani; but it must always be preceded by an M. In Nahuatl the liquid L is frequent; but it is the initial of no word in that language. The Nahuas apparently could not pronounce it, unless some other articulate sound preceded it.
Albornoz, in his Grammar of the Chapanec Tongue, [342] states that the natives cannot pronounce an initial B, G, Y, or D, without uttering an N sound before it. ”

“ I pointed out that in this he was wrong, as early Nahuatl records use it in this sense.
The Alaguilac language of Guatemala, long a puzzle to linguistics, is shown in (44) to be an isolated dialect of the Nahuatl.
Nos. (45) , (46) , (47) , (49) and (54) , have been already mentioned.
The term Chilan balam, which may be freely rendered “the inspired speaker,” was the title of certain priests of the native Mayas. Many records in the Maya tongue, written after the conquests, go by the name of “the Books of Chilan Balam.” They have never been published, but copies of them, made by Dr. ”

“ The Mexican antiquary Mendoza has marshalled far more coincidences of like character and equal worth to show that the Nahuatl is an Aryan dialect descended from the Sanscrit. [39] In fine, any, even the remotest, linguistic connection between American and Mongolian languages has yet to be shown; and any linguist who considers the radically diverse genius of the two groups of tongues will not expect to find such relationship. ”

“ At all events, to the majority of readers, a perfect pronunciation of the Indian words is immaterial. Many white men, living within the borders of the Navaho land, converse with these Indians in a jargon or debased language which might be spelled in English characters with their ordinary English values. For example, let us take the word for hut or house. This is properly pronounced hogán; but the whites in New Mexico generally call it hogan, and the Navahoes never fail to understand the word as thus pronounced. ”

“ Certain it is, that at an early date a mixed dialect came into vogue, both in the Mangue districts of Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America, composed of a broken-down Nahuatl and a corrupt Spanish, which, at first, served as a means of communication between the conquerors and their subjects, and later became, to some degree, the usual tongue of the latter. ”

“ Most, if not all of them, are related to, if indeed they did not spring from one mother tongue, the Maya, of which a dialect, called the Tzendal is said to be the oldest language spoken in any of these countries. In fact, they all appear to be dialects and variations of some few tongues of yet greater antiquity, which again have sprung from the oldest of all, the Maya. ”

“ Kumeyaay tribes on the US side of the border are often hesitant to share language materials, even with each other, let alone academics or non-Kumeyaay people. In contrast, on the Mexican side of the border, community language ideologies are typically more variationist (Kroskrity 2002; Kroskrity and Field 2009) , such that everyone acknowledges dialect variation, yet insists that all dialects are mutually intelligible and therefore one language, shared by all. ”

“ From the evidence, dialetic diversity prevails to such an extent that almost every petty tribe has its idiom; so that, even if affinities do exist, sufficient to justify a classification into languages and dialects, so meagre is our knowledge that it is impossible in many instances to say which are languages and which dialects. Hence 608 in my classification I cannot do better than to make of the Nootka one language, and give a list of the dialects on the island, with all the information concerning them at my command. ”

“ Here at school the future chiefs and braves and squaws of tribes-to-be learn to speak the mother tongue—English, the language of the world—with passable fluency, though, often coming from far-distant sections of the Northland, they cannot understand or speak each other’s dialect—a fact rather surprising to the casual visitor, who is apt to fall into the error of thinking all Indians speak the same language. ”

“ It is a pity, indeed, that the Delawares, the Wyandots and the Potowatamies, with languages formed on a construction which had not been before thought of, come to destroy their beautiful theories. What then? are we to suppress the languages of our good Indians, or to misrepresent them, that the existing systems on Universal Grammar and the origin of language may be preserved? No, my friend, we shall on the contrary, I hope, labour with all our might to make them known, and provide, at least, additional facts for future theorists. ”

“ I think that there are many things that block the creation of these materials, and one of those it's that, there are no people working with the language. So, there has been a message towards the Indigenous communities and toward the Indigenous languages that our languages don't have a grammar, and that our languages are oral, and they can’t be, like, written. ”

“ How absurd, therefore, to suppose that primeval savages originated a language which has held its own like the old Aryan and become the prolific mother of the three or four thousand dialects now in existence! Before a durable language can arise, there must be an aggregation of numerous tribes into a people, so that there may be need of communication on a large scale, and so that tradition may be strengthened. ”

“ Whichever it was, such a sacred dialect is found in almost all tribes. There are fragments of it from the cultivated races of Mexico, Yucatan and Peru; and at the other end of the scale we may instance the Guaymis, of Darien, naked savages, but whose "chiefs of the law," we are told, taught "the doctrines of their religion in a peculiar idiom, invented for the purpose, and very different from the common language." ”

“ For example, if materials from only one dialect are published to a greater extent than another, this may result in de facto promotion of that one dialect to the status of “standard”, and may privilege that variety over others for use in future language revitalisation efforts (Muhlhauser 1996; Hale 2001; Eisenlohr 2004; Hill 2002) . In Native North America, there is today not a single speech community that is not endangered at some level. ”

“ This [14] is not related to the Nahuatl tongue, but the terms of their magical rites are drawn from Nahuatl words, showing their origin. Every person at birth has assigned to him both a good and a bad genius, the former aiming at his welfare, the latter at his injury. The good genius is known by the Nahuatl term tonale, and it is represented in the first bird or animal of any kind which is seen in or near the house immediately after the birth of the infant.
The most powerful person in the village is the high priest of the native cult. ”

“ If, however, educated Natives resolved to apply themselves to a study so peculiarly suited to them, I consider it certain that excellent results would soon be realised. If they began to compare their vernaculars one with another, ancient forms with modern, and both with Sanskrit, they would soon find that Language had a history of its own, throwing light on all other histories, and that instead of being the driest of subjects, it was one of the richest in matters of wide human interest. ”

“ Latin is a daughter of the Aryan; and the Aryan, together with the other sister languages is, no doubt, the daughter of the original language spoken by Noah and his immediate descendants. There can not well be more than 4 generations of languages, and the time since Noah is sufficient for the development of the 1000 languages and dialects. The American Indians have developed about 200 in 3,000 or 4,000 years. The life of a language roughly speaking, seems to range from 1000 to 3,000 years. The time since Noah is sufficient for the development of all the languages of the world. ”

“ Never can a living people change radically or discontinuously, nor can its natural and organised mode of thinking, which expresses itself in the form or structure of its speech, be radically changed.
(iii) My next proposition is that what is called a patois or a rude or vulgar speech, is never a separate language. Isolation and want of culture bring about deformities, and these deformities characterise a language as a rude dialect. The language of the Māl Pāhāḍis is as much Bengali as the language of the peasants of Northern Yorkshire is English. ”

“ The Nahua language represented a very low state of culture. Speech is the general measure of the standard of thought of a people, and if we judged the civilisation of the Nahua by theirs, we should be justified in concluding that they had not yet emerged from barbarism. But we must recollect that the Nahua of the conquest period had speedily adopted the older civilisation which they had found awaiting them on their entrance to Mexico, and had retained their own primitive tongue. ”

“ From a careful examination of the early authorities, I can but entertain the opinion that the Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec languages are one, that the Nahua, or Aztec, is the oldest known language of Anáhuac, and that contrary conclusions arrived at by certain later writers are merely speculative. All of the many different peoples mentioned as aboriginal in ancient Anáhuac are said to have spoken the Aztec, as the Ulmecs, Xicalancas, Tecpanecs, Colhuas, Acolhuas, Nahuas, etc. ”

“ Moreover, opportunities for collecting linguistic material are growing fewer day by day, as tribes are consolidated upon reservations, as they become civilized, and as the older Indians, who alone are skilled in their language, die, leaving, it may be, only a few imperfect vocabularies as a basis for future study. History has bequeathed to us the names of many tribes, which became extinct in early colonial times, of whose language not a hint is left and whose linguistic relations must ever remain unknown. ”

“ The second proposition I should put forward is, that it is only when a new structure is gradually built with new elements on a fresh basis, a new language is evolved; but that this new language, by merely coming in contact with other languages cannot change its own structure, for such change means nothing but death or extinction of that language. The imperceptible slow change with which a new language is developed is by itself a matter for study. ”

“ The majority of the sculptured tablets which are preserved are no doubt in the Maya or some of its dialects. What is most satisfactory to us, is the probability that the language is spoken to-day by the mass of the native population of Yucatan as it was anciently, for says Señor Pimentel, “the Indians have preserved this idiom with such tenacity that to this day they will speak no other,” and he adds that it is necessary for the whites to address them in their own tongue in order to communicate with them. ”