Nahuatl Scholar Interview: R. Joe Campbell

Believe it or not, this was Joe's first selfie.
It's Joe on the left.
(taken in Guadalajara July, 2018)

In this blogpost, I give you an interview with one of the great Nahuatl scholars alive today, R. Joe Campbell. I have had the good fortune to meet Joe a number of times at Nahuatl meetings, and in 2018 when we met at the Uto-Aztecan meetings in Guadalajara Joe and I hung out together for a couple of days after the meetings. I asked if I could do an interview with him for my blog, and he agreed. Then the interview sat there for awhile, so I asked Joe if he wanted to update it with some more details, which he did. And here it is, the first in a series of interviews with great Nahuatl scholars.

Joe is one of the popularizers of the Nahuatl orthography system sometimes known as "Andrews-Campbell-Karttunen" orthography, which was first developed by J. Richard Andrews, subsequently employed in Joe's and Fran Karttunen’s influential "Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar", and Frances Karttunen's "Analytical Dictionary". (His first major work, “A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl” came out in 1985 and precedes his use of the Andrews orthography.) He is also a pioneer in computerized Nahuatl study, having begun working on Nahuatl computerized lexicography back when computers were the size of a building and used punch cards. He is still working on two major works: an integrated version of all of Alonso de Molina's three dictionaries, analyzed into individual morphemes and with the possibility of running all kinds of searches for combinations of different morphemes and a dictionary combining the vocabulary of both Molina and the Florentine Codex.

Joe has worked with Nahuatl for more than 50 years, and in this interview he tells a little about his career in Nahuatl studies and his different contributions to the field. 

MPH: So Joe, would you mind telling a little bit about how you got into Nahuatl in the first place and when?

RJC: OK, In 1962, I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois studying Spanish linguistics. And I took a couple of courses with Ken Hale, who was a young PhD, fresh out of Indiana University studying with Carl Voegelin, and in the spring of 1962, he said "Joe, some of the anthropology students are going to Mexico this summer and they're going to study Nahuatl. We're going to Tepoztlán and they're going to do fieldwork." And he said "you could go along, and would you be interested in going along and studying the Spanish dialect of Tepoztlán and see what the effects of Nahuatl were on the Spanish?" And I said "Oh, I'd really like to do that." And so, my then-wife and I and two daughters came to Mexico, and they went to spend the summer with her parents in Guadalajara and I went directly to Tepoztlán. And Ken and I went up to San Juan Tlacotenco at the top of the mountain, and while we were there we met a guy that spoke Nahuatl fluently -- one of the youngest people in town that did -- met him, made friends with him. And then later on Ken took me to see a rather elderly man who had fought during the revolution and sat me down to study with him, and as we worked along I found that he was a very nice guy, but he was very impatient. I didn't have a good ear at the time. I think it has gotten a lot better now. But when he said, I asked him how to say "camino" and he said "ohtli", and I said "otli", and he said "no! ohtli!", and I said "sí, otli". And with his reaction, I saw that he and I probably couldn't work together. We turned out to be very good friends all summer, and I found a much

Joe working with a friend from Tepoztlán

younger person to work with, with considerably more patience.

MPH: So what did you do when you came back from Tepoztlán? How did you continue with you Nahuatl studies after your first visit?

RJC:I wrote a paper for Ken, and then with the things I had to do, write the thesis at Illinois and search for a job at Indiana, Nahuatl sort of got put on the backburner. I got my first job at Indiana University and after I had been there well, like five years, one of the young professors came down the hall and he was doing legwork for the chairman, looking for a federal grant. Because the federal government was interested in doing unusual languages, languages that were not likely to be spoken by ...quote ..."the enemy". And he said, if we apply for a grant and say that we can offer Nahuatl, would you be willing to teach it? And I said, "well I am really not prepared to teach it on the basis of six weeks of experience", and also with the intervening years. And so I said "I would be willing to do it if I had an informant, if I had somebody to work with me in the class". And they came back to me and said "We're more than willing to do that; we'll pay for an informant and all the expenses and everything, but ... you would need to go find somebody". And to make a long story short, I was going to be in Mexico all the summer of 1970, and I went to Tepoztlan -- a friend of mine in Tepoztlan, Karen Dakin -- and she paired me up with a friend of hers, the anthropologist Judith Friedlander, and we went to Hueyapan and we found a young lady who was very happy to go to the United States and work for a year, that was Elvira [Hérnandez]. 

MPH: So you really learned Nahuatl when you were teaching it with Doña Elvira Hernández from Hueyapan?

Joe with Elvira Hernández in Hueyapan

RJC: That is exactly right. She and I, we started at the beginning of the school year. And she educated me in class, and then we had three hours a week out of class, and it was just like having an intensive teacher.

MPH: And when did you start getting into studying the colonial version of the language?

RJC: When Elvira came back to Mexico, I taught Nahuatl for two more years by myself and used sources like González Casanova's folktales and a lot of structural material. But during those two years I started realizing that if I really wanted to get more details of Nahuatl I would have to look at printed sources. So I started putting the Molina 1571 Nahuatl-Spanish half dictionary on punched cards. And it ended up that the whole second half of 1571 fit on something like 20,000 cards. That's ten boxes of cards. And then from there on, I worked in San Antonio with the whole card deck, inserting English translations into the boxes. So it swelled up, and so in one year -- from I think it was 75-76 -- I managed to translate all of the Spanish of the second half into English. And while I was doing that I was realizing that I should also enter the record by means of another punched card with the morphology codes typed out on that card.

MPH: So maybe you can explain a little, what is a perforated card and what is a morphology code?

Perforated card used for early digital computing.

RJC: A punched card was a card with eighty columns for punching holes in different combinations to represent letters. And people who used them actually started understanding what the perforations meant: There was a top row and a second row and the top row and second row then correlated with a set down below of one through ten and a combination of top and 1 was an A and top and 2 was a B and so on. 

MPH: Ok, so it was a very simple form of machine readable code? 

RJC: Yes, it weighed a lot more than a floppy disk.

MPH: So basically it would be fair to say that you were probably one of the first people to start using computational technology for working with Nahuatl?

RJC: I was the first one that I knew of, and I don't remember anybody else doing it while I was working on it in the seventies. But here you must remember that when we’re talking about punch cards, ‘computerized’ only means how we stored and re-arranges data. I have seen more than one suggestion that somehow the morphological analyses are done “by computer” and adds. They are NOT. Every morphological analysis is my considered opinion. The computer really has nothing to do with it.

MPH: So, the first work of yours that I became aware of was an article that you had in IJAL in 1976, about the phonology of Hueyapan Nahuatl, which I read for the first time before I went to do field work in Hueyapan myself in 2003. Could you summarize how that article came about and what is the interesting part of the argument?

RJC: I am not sure if I can remember the data very well, but I was working with paradigms that I learned from Elvira and I was trying to come up with a very logical description of the morphology. And it turns out that when you look at the representation of some words it is very straight forward: there is part one, two and three and they sound the same in either present tense or preterit. But then there was some verbs that looked like they had an underlying /w/ that was phonetically a [v] that in the preterit would turn into a velar [ŋ]. And, I thought well it's underlyingly a /w/ its phonetically a [v] and in another form it is an [n], what kind of segment could that possibly be? So because of the influence of an article by Sol Saporta in Spanish where he talked about the problem of palatal l and l and y in Spanish, in words like [mil] "thousand" and [miyón] "million" [this article], I came up with the idea that what that segment was could probably be a /ŋw/ a velar nasal with a labial release. So that would explain why Hueyapan Nahuatl had the present tense form [noga:va] "I stay", and the preterit form  [onoga:ŋ] "I stayed". 

MPH: Then another really important thing you've done has been the foundation course. How did that come about?

RJC: When I went back, well I went from San Antonio to Nebraska and stayed in Nebraska for two years, and then I went back to Indiana. And they had the Nahuatl course waiting for me when I got there and asked me to do that. And so, I didn't have a textbook, and I thought, rather than do a sort of struggling course the way I did in the early 70s, I thought what I ought to do would be to write simply a series of disconnected lessons, starting with the most simple things and doing lots of exercises where people had to do recognition and recall. And I started writing as many lessons as it took to get through the semester. And as I gave the course a couple of times more during the 80s, I wrote more and more lessons. -- Not a lot of explanation, because the explanations were mainly things that I did in class. But I gave them a lot of heavy take-home stuff to work on and come back and build up their memory on things. And as a matter of fact in 1987, I had already shown this rather big stack of exercises to Fran Karttunen who had been a friend of mine for a long long time. And at one point Fran said - that was in 1987 - she was going to have a government funded institute in the summer of ’89, and would I teach the modern dialect and she would do the classical track and could we use a selection from my set of exercises. And if we could, she would supply a denser set of explanations so it would be easier to work on at home; and she would also put in the vowel length which I had not taken the trouble to do. And that's what we did, we used it for a six week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in Austin Texas. 

MPH: And then the other thing is that when you finished the translation of the 1571 Molina in 1975, that was not at all the last thing you did on the Molinas. Can you tell us a little about what you have been doing with the Molina dictionary since then? 

Frontispiece of Molina's 1571 vocabulario

RJC:The translation of the second part of the 1571 dictionary was just the first step. I followed it up by preparing a morphological analysis of the Nahuatl vocabulary of the Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary and doing the programming to make it possible to sort all Nahuatl entries along with their morphological analyses and English translations under each of their component morphemes.

I happened to show the resulting print-out to professors Lloyd Kasten and John Nitti of the University of Wisconsin during a reception at our house following a lecture that they gave in Bloomington involving the use of computing technology in the study and preparation of old documents. This was probably in 1984. They expressed interest in having the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies publish the morpheme index and gave me explicit instructions to make it possible for me to insert the printing codes into my data so that the final publication came directly from the computer tape that I submitted to them -- by this time I had moved past cards-- since re-setting something so complicated would have been impossible. Somewhere there is a picture of me standing at the Post Office window posing with the 12x12 inch package in my hand. The result was my A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl: a morpheme index to the vocabulario en lengua mexicana y castellana of Fray Alonso de Molina (Madison, 1985). 

The morphology I did in the Morphological Dictionary is somewhat more rudimentary than what I am doing now. For instance if you have a word like <tlacatl>, that is a simple morpheme (well actually, it’s two, but people don’t think much about the -tl being separate), but if you have a word like <nitetlacatilia> there are actually five pieces. In the Morphological Dictionary I just coded this as tlacatl-verb-caus for the noun tlaca-tl, the verb-forming morpheme -ti- (become) and the causative -lia. I did not code the ni- (I) -te- (someone) or the other personal prefixes at all. 

Later I made up numerical codes for the prefixes that would set them up in ways that were reasonable instead of spelling them out and I made a number of separate categories for the verb-forming morphemes as well as for the causative and benefactive morphemes and the preterits. Today the morphology for nitetlacatilia is p11-p53-tla:catl-v01a-caus04. I still treat the absolutive suffixes as part of the spelling for the noun morphemes because it makes the nouns more recognizable for most people.

Since I had done the English translation of the 1571 dictionary...The 1571 dictionary is really two dictionaries and I call them Molina 1 and Molina 2 - and I had only worked on Molina 2 - the Nahuatl-Spanish. And so I thought that what I should do would be to put in the 1555 and the first half, the Molina 1, into machine readable form. By then I had graduated from punched cards to putting them in in electronic mode - just keying them in, which struck me as a rather strange thing to do rather than using cards, but I did that. And I by-passed translating the other two dictionaries in favor of spending all my time inserting morpheme codes after each entry in all three Molina dictionaries. My goal here is what I call The Integrated Molina Dictionary -- the gathered Nahuatl entries with their morphological analyses, their Spanish equivalents and, where I have it from M2, the English translations of the Spanish. This is actually very nearly finished, except that I keep setting it aside to work on the Florentine Codex vocabulary.

MPH: So basically, rather than just translating the Spanish translation of the Nahuatl word, what you did was to also analyze the Nahuatl word piece for piece and type it up as part of the entries for the three Molina dictionaries. So about how many entries is that for the entire Molina corpus?

RJC: Well, actually, it wasn’t “in addition” to translating. I only translated the Spanish of Molina2. Ok, I can't remember off the top of my head. But the Molina 2, the Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary has 23,623 words, and the 1555 has something over 15,000 and I don't remember what the Molina 1, the Spanish-Nahuatl, has - but it is somewhere in between those figures. And of course one of the kind of things I did was to write a program to sort Molina 1555 and Molina 1 and 2 together on lexical items, and then I had a cluster that showed what each dictionary said about any given item.

MPH: So how about many entries do you have in your morpheme database at this point?

RJC: So I am a little bit unclear on this, because I also have an extra little ambitious thing that I did, which was to also code items for various kinds of things; say I would code them for an error that Molina did in parsing things, for example when Molina stripped the prefixes of a verb he would sometimes he would cut off the beginning of the verb itself. So I put in a code so that I could gather all of those things. And I was also interested in the fact that there was a certain amount of spelling variation like the dropping of n, y and w, and so I coded for either dropping or retention. And if you simply add all of the codes for those different kinds of notes plus the morphemes, right now, my "morpheme" count is around one million one hundred thousand.

MPH: That's a lot of words. Can you tell us briefly some of the cool things that your program can do with that data? The type of searches you can run and the kind of information you can extract?

RJC: The very first thing I was aiming at was being able to give an alphabetical index of all the words in the three Molinas integrated, and that is pure vanilla dictionary construction. But the next thing I wanted to do was to compile a list of morphemes so that anybody could look up alphabetically in a list of morphemes and find all the words in any one of the three Molinas that had that morpheme. So from the very beginning I was constructing a morpheme index of the whole thing. And then because of some of the advantages I saw in looking at the whole vocabulary from the end of the word, I also wrote a program that could give you a backwards index. So for example everything that ended in -tilia, you'd find every single word that had that. Parallelly and not meaning to get distracted fom Molina, but yes I did get distracted from Molina, I also together with a friend of mine from France, Marc Eisinger, we put the Nahuatl of the Florentine Codex into machine readable form, we each did one book and another, and then he did the entire verification of all the Florentine Codex, just a monstrous job. (Verification is when you re-enter data so that a program can find where one copy differs from the other.) And then I spent three years in the late eighties integrating the Nahuatl and the Dibble and Anderson English translation - it took three years to get them to match sentences. And then I spent a long time adding a regularized spelling line to the Florentine entries so that the computer could bring together instances of a word that was spelled differently in different places. And then, I could correlate words from the Florentine with words from Molina, that's one thing, and then the other thing independently from Molina, since the Florentine was text it was sentences in contexts, it would be interesting for anyone to see how a given word was used, in context, so I wrote a concordance program that will allow you to interrogate the Florentine database for any string that you wanted. For instance... well, there were two different things: one would construct an index based on any alphabetical representation so you could look for "tlacat" or you could extend it and look for "tlacatil", whatever... But the other thing was, and certainly based on favors that people did me in enlightening me - Fred Householder at Indiana had a computer colleague that had been doing some work on texts and he had the idea of hanging codes on words in context… He wasn't working on Nahuatl but I turned it into working on Nahuatl. If you wanted to look at anything that was related to <tlacatl> then you could hang a morpheme under that and you could make an index of every morpheme and then you would get the word in-text, in context. So what I did was to label, I had to fill in for every word that I could, and that means a lot that I couldn't, I made every word in the sentence a key to that sentence and then every translation of those given Nahuatl words was a key to the Nahuatl word which was a key to the sentence. In this way I could retrieve a lot of interesting information.

MPH: So you have been working on this for 43 years. When are you going to be done, and what is the final product going to look like?

RJC: I originally hoped... Well I keep changing my mind about what the goal could possibly be. The original goal was to do Molina. But then I started realizing that it would be a lot more valuable to do a combined study of the Molina and the Florentine. And then I started realizing that it was very unlikely that I would have time in life to do all of it, so I said Ok, I will just do Molina. But while I have been working on Molina I never stopped analyzing sections of the Florentine. As a matter of fact it is not sections of the Florentine, but I look for a given thing in the Florentine, and I go through and find every token of it and mark it for whatever it needs - morphology, phonetic variation and things like that. And if there are errors in the Dibble and Anderson translation, I put in a note on every sentence where I find that going on. And every time I do, I always think, I am in awe of what they did, but we are all humans, we all make mistakes.

MPH: Yes, and we can keep improving on it. Thank you very much Joe, for telling us about your work.

RJC: You're welcome, I enjoyed it.

---

Here, we end the blog with a list of some of Joe's most significant publications (several coauthored with his wife Mary Clayton who is also a Nahuatl scholar):

• Campbell, R. J. (1976). Underlying/ŋw/in Hueyapan nahuatl. International Journal of American Linguistics, 42(1), pp. 46-50.

• Campbell, R. J. (1985). A Morphological Dictionary of Classical Nahuatl: A Morpheme Index to the Vocabulario en Lengua Mexicana Y Castellana of Fray Alonso de Molina. Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. University of Texas.

• Campbell, R. J., & Clayton, M. L. (1988). Bernardino de Sahagún’s Contributions to the Lexicon of Classical Nahuatl. The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, pp. 295-314.

• Campbell, R. J., & Karttunen, F. E. (1989). Foundation course in Nahuatl grammar (Vol. 1). Institute of Latin American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin.

• Clayton, Mary L., and R. Joe Campbell. (2002) "Alonso de Molina as Lexicographer." Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas. pp. 336-90.

How to spell Nahuatl? Nawatl? Nauatl?

My last blog post was about how the Nahua people wrote before the arrival of Europeans with their alphabetic writing system. But almost all Nahuatl texts from the colonial period onwards are of course written in alphabetic writing. In this blog post, I describe the many different conventions for writing Nahuatl using the Latin script.

For the past 80 years, Nahuatl scholars have argued about how to standardize Nahuatl orthography and what conventions to use. Different groups of scholars and activists have recommended  and supported different systems. Sometimes scholars and Nahauatl activists seem to be spending more time arguing about how to write Nahuatl than they do on actually writing it. There are even cases where a single community has two different lanugage revitalization projects that refuse to cooperate because they use different spelling systems!

In this post, I try to describe the different types of writing conventions that are in use for Nahuatl, and to show their relation to different schools of thought within Nahuatl scholarship.

Roughly we can classify Nahuatl orthographies into two main types, each of which has a bunch of variatoins. One group we can call "Classical orthographies", because they base their orthographic choices on the conventions used by the Spanish speaking friars who wrote the first alphabetic texts in the early 16th century. The other group we can call "Modern orthographies" because they were introduced by academic linguists working to find the most linguistically efficient ways to represent the Nahuatl language in writing in the early 20th century. Both types of orthographies can be used to represent colonial Nahuatl as well as contemporary varieties.

For the current purpose we can define the two types of orthographies in this way:

• Classical Orthographies: are those that value continuity with the colonial tradition of nahuatl writing - and which adopt colonial conventions because of the value they have as connectors with that tradition.
• Modern Orthographies: are those that value linguistic efficiency and which aim to represent the Nahuatl language in ways that are either easier to learn or which facilitate a higher analytical precision by representing linguistic elements (phonemes, morphemes) in ways that are minimally variable and maximally efficient.

In practice most orthographies include elements of both "classical" and "modern" principles. 

Classical Orthographies: 

Sometimes people talk about "classical orthography" as if it is a single well-established standard. Really it is not, and it never was. In the 16th century when Nahuatl was first written alphabetically, the idea of a standardized orthography didn't even exist - and there was no established orthography for any of the spoken main languages such as English or Spanish (as anyone trying to read Shakespeare or Cortés' letters will realize). Authors writing in any of these languages simply used the writing conventions they learned from their teachers and put them to the best possible use to get their points across in the easiest way. They tended to write these languages as they were spoken, representing the sounds more or less as they pronounced them. And when they began writing Nahuatl they did the same, tried to use the conventions they knew from writing Spanish to represent the sounds of Nahuatl. This is why the only thing that is really shared by all "classical orthographies" is the fact that they represent the sounds that exist both in Nahuatl and in Spanish using the letters that were most commonly used in Spanish to represent these sounds. For example, Spanish had adopted the Latin convention of writing the sound [k] with the letter <c> before the vowels [a] and [o] but with the letters <qu> before the vowels [i] and [e]. Luckily, actually most of the sounds in Nahuatl are also found in Spanish, which meant that this method was fairly succesful. And in fact in the 16th century, Spanish phonology was even more similar to that of Nahuatl - because at that time Spanish didnt have the harsh j-sound (like in scottish Loch), but instead had a soft sh-sound as in fish which also exists in Nahuatl. They wrote this sound with the letter <x>, because that is how they generally wrote the sh-sound in Spanish. Only over the next century did Spanish gradually change the sh-sound to the harsh j-sound (and eventually began writing it with a j). (This, incidentally, is why the x is pronounced harshly in words like Mexico/Mejico, Oaxaca and Xalapa/Jalapa - but not in the corresponding Nahuatl versions which are pronounced meshi'ko, washakak and shalapan).

However there are some sounds that are found in Nahuatl that do not exist in Spanish: Primarily, the Nahuatl signature sound the tl (written in the International Phonetic Alphabet as  [t͡ɬ]), but this turned out to be easy to write with the letter combination <tl>. The sound [kw]  (as in queen )likewise turned out to be easy to write, since this sound also existed in Spanish as (although in Spanish it is a combination of k and u, and not a single consonant sound) so they wrote it <qu> or <cu>. The Nahuatl consonant [ t͡s] also didnt exist in Spanoish, but the Friars knew the sound from Hebrew and wrote it in the same way they would when transliterating the scripture using the letter combination <tz>. Nahuatl also had the consonant sound [w] (as in "wat?") which was not found in Spanish - friars couldn't quite decide on how to write this one, but usually they simply represented it with the vowel letter <u> - sometimes combined with a consonant letter such as <hu> or <gu> (More about this below, under Canger's orthography).

But the most difficult sounds to write were the glottal stop (or h) neither of which existed in Spanish; and the distinction between long and short vowel duration. At first most friars didn't even realize that these sounds actually existed in Nahuatl, so they simply didnt write them! This is the main difference between the orthographies of the Franciscan friars and the Jesuits.

Franciscan style orthographies:

In the 16th century the most widely used Nahuatl orthographies were those developed by the Franciscans. The Franciscans had a highly practical approach to evangelizing, without too many theoretical considerations - they just did whatever seemed to work (which sometimes got them on the wrong side of other ecclesiastic orders such as the more orthodox Dominicans). The same approach worked in the area of orthography, where the Franciscans never pined much about being consistent or about how best to write. This pragmatic approach was probably partly what allowed the Franciscans friars and their indigenous aides to author the most extensive documentation of  any Indigenous language in the colonial Americas. The 16th century saw major Nahuatl works like Andres de Olmos' Nahuatl grammar, Bernardino de Sahagún's 12 volume encyclopedia about Indigenous Nahua culture (now called the Florentine Codex) and Alonso de Molina's vocabularies. None of these works represented the saltillo or the vowel length distinction, and they were extremely inconsistent in representing sounds like [w] and [j]  - and even so they worked fine and thousands of Nahuas learned to write using these loose conventions. Apparently they didn't loose much sleep worrying about the fact that the representation of some minimal pairs was ambiguous (e.g. [tla:tia] "to hide" and [tlatia] "to burn" both of which was written <tlatia>, or [paʔti] "to become well" or [pa:ti] "to melt" both of which were written <pati>, and even the difference between plural and singular of verbs in the present tense as [kochi] "he sleeps" and [kochiʔ] "they sleep" were both written <cochi>). When Franciscans sometimes heard the saltillo (they only ever seem to have heard it bwhen it occurred before another consonant) and decided to write it, they used the letter <h> giving <pahti> "to cure", <pati> "to melt". 

Other than these conventions Franciscans (and the vast majority of colonial 

Nahuatl authors) were very unruly in their orthographies - for example they used the letters u and o interchangeably for the vowels [o] and [o:], they used the letters <i> and <j> and <y> interchangeably both for the vowel [i] and the consonant [j], they used <hu>, <u> and <o> intechangeably for the consonant [w] and used the letters <z>, <c>  and <ç> for the sound [s]. '

Really, by modern standards the Franciscan orthography was a mess - and yet we are fully able to read it today just as they were back in the 16th century. This tells me that consistency and standardization of orthographies is vastly overrated. 

Jesuit style orthographies: 

Page from Carochi's 1645 grammar which uses macron to show long vowels
and circumflex accent to show wordfinal saltillo.

Among the catholic orders the Jesuits have a reputation for being studious and academically inclined. The jesuit orthographic tradition for Nahuatl embodies this reputation for thoughtfulness, and Jesuits were among the first scholars to have theoretical insights about how the Nahuatl language differed from Spanish and other well known languages and how this ought to influence the way the language was written. Nonetheless, most of the honor for these insights should probably be given to the first Nahuatl grammarian who was also a Nahua person and a Nahuatl native speaker: the jesuit priest Antonio del Rincon. He wrote a short grammar in which he noted the existence of the saltillo and vowel length distinction and to suggest marking it in writing to represent the language more faithfully. His suggestions were taken up a fifty years later by fellow Jesuit Horacio Carochi who introduced a fully developed system for marking vowel length and saltillo systematically. Following Rincon, Carochi used diacritical marks to show these distinctions and he marked the saltillo with an accent (grave, or circumflex) and vowel length with a macron.

Hence the words "to cure" and "to melt" he wrote <pàti> and <pāti> respectively and the difference between "he sleeps" and "they sleep" he wrote <cochi> and <cochî>. Sometimes he marked short vowels with a breve sign <ă>, but he did not do this consistently (since it is redundant to mark both long and short, he only marked short vowels when a long vowel would change the meaning).

The Andrews-Campbell-Karttunen orthography:

Karttunen's dictionary which has
popularized the ACK orthography.

In the mid-twentieth century American historians discovered the rich trove of Nahuatl language writings and began working with them. Among the earliest historians looking at these works were Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble who translated Sahagun's Florentine Codex into English. Another scholar to take up the study of Nahuatl was the grammarian  J. Richard Andrews, who published his grammar of the "classical" language in 1975. He chose an orthography that was linguistically accurate marking all the phonemes including the vowel length distinction and the saltillo - and which combined aspects of the Franciscan and Jesuit tradition. Specifically he adopted Carochi's use of macron for marking long vowels, and the tradition penchant for marking the saltillo with <h>. He conventionalized the use of <hu> to write the sound <w> before a vowel and <uh> syllable-finally

Andrews' orthography was in turn adopted and conventionalized further by R. Joe Campbell and Frances Karttunen in their Foundation Course and in Campbell's morphological dictionary, and the important dictionary of Frances Karttunen (the first full Nahuatl-English dictionary, and the first to consistently mark the vowel length distinction). This orthography was further adopted by the school of historians trained by James Lockhart who collaborated with Karttunen in the 1970s. Today, almost all new editions of colonial Nahuatl texts adopt the Andrews-Campbell-Karttunen orthography as the standard (although many of them choose not to mark vowel length). 

One problematic feature of the ACK orthography (thanks to John Sullivan for introducing this term which i stole from one of his facebook statuses) is that it uses the letter <h> in three distinct functions - as the saltillo and as a part of the <hu>-digraph used to write [w] and as part of the <ch> digraph. This gives spellings with two consecutive h's such as  michhuacan [mit͡ʃwaʔka:n] (name of the state Michoacan - "Place of Fishowners"), or ohhui [oʔwi]"difficult". And it also creates near-ambiguity in cases where a [k] sound written with <c> precedes a [w] written with <hu>  over a syllable boundary (e.g. cachuia "to provide someone with sandals" where the reader has to realize that the <ch> is pronounced as [kw] and not [ch].) From the point of view of a proponent of a modern "efficiency based" orthography, clusters like <hhu>, <chhu> and <chu> where the letter <h> has a different value, comes across as unelegant and unnecessary - even though it is not technically ambiguous.

The use of <h> for saltillo also has the problem that it makes it impossible to distinguish in writing between varieties that pronounce the saltillo as a glottal stop, and those that pronounce it as an [h] - and it also somewhat implies that the h-pronunciation is the norm, when in fact we know that the normative pronunciation in the Nahua capital of Tenochtitlan was the glottal stop. 

The main advantages of the ACK orthography is that 1. it is very similar to the ortography used for most colonial texts and makes the transition from the study of the grammars (using Andrews and Karttunen's works) to the reading of colonial texts very easy, 2. it marks each Nahuatl phoneme with a single letter (or letter combination) and uses only symbols found on a standard American keyboard. 

Launey's orthography

About the same time that Andrews was working in the US, a French linguist was also working on a major analysis of the Nahuatl language based on the Florentine Codex and on Carochi's grammar. Michel Launey published a full didactic grammar of Nahuatl in French in 1979. He chose to use Carochi's conventions for marking saltillo with diacritic marks, standardizing them, and getting rid of the breve accent on short vowels. Since Launey's work was first published only in French and Spanish, (and a somewhat inadequate English translation in 2011) it mostly gained currency in Europe and Mexico, and among linguists more than among historians. His main work, the 1986 thèse d'etat, still exists only in French. It is to my mind the single best grammar of colonial Nahuatl written - surpassing the work of Andrews, and that of Carochi (francophone readers can check it out here). 

The Carochi-Launey orthography has the advantage that because the saltillo is marked as a diacritic it avoids the collisions of digraphs that are found in the ACK orthography, and it avoids implicitly suggesting the pronunciation <h> as the way to pronounce the saltillo.

Canger's orthography

Una Canger is a Danish linguist (and my first Nahuatl teacher) and writes in many different orthographies - this is because she works with many contemporary varieties and adopt the conventions that work best with the variety and its speakers and her own linguistic sensibilities. For the writing of Nahuatl she has made one important proposal. 

In a 2011 article, Canger described the how it happened that Nahuatl grammarians ended up writing the sound [w] with the letter combination <hu>. She shows that the tradition originates with the Franciscan Andres de Olmos - but she also shows that he did not always write the phoneme [w] as <hu> or <uh> - in fact he mostly did this when the [w] followed a consonant or preceded a word boundary or a consonant in the subsequent syllable. When the u was For example he wrote the word [siwatl] "woman" as <çiuatl>, but the word [yeʔwatl] "he/she/it" he writes <yehuatl> and the word "my wife" [nosiwaw] he writes <noçiuauh>. This leads Canger to suggest that what Olmos was doing was that he was using the <h> to show to the reader that the <w> is pronounced differently when it occurs wordfinally or before or after a consonant than when it occurs between two vowels. In fact drawing on her knowledge of contemporary Nahuatl, Canger suggests that it is exactly the aspiration that often accompanies the devoiced variant of <w> that Olmos was representing with the h (this argument is also strengthened by the fact that Olmos also writes h after the letter l in the same positions - since l also devoices under those conditions). Canger then shows that subsequent grammarians adopted Olmos convention of using hu without understanding the way that he used it, and instead of writing only devoiced w with h they used it across the board. This confusion is the ultimate reason for the problematic digraphs found in the ACK orthography and other orthographies that use the <hu> convention. Instead, Canger suggests returning to Olmos original principle - representing the [w] sound with the vowel letter <u>. Hence Canger does not write "nahuatl" but nauatl (as did Olmos and many colonial authors) or else nawatl writing the [w] as <w>. 

While it seems that Canger would prefer a more modern orthography using k and w and s instead of c/qu and u and z/c, she suggests that also scholars who prefer a classical style of orthography ought to return to writing [w] as <u>. Canger's proposal shares all the advantages of the ACK and Launey orthographies - and avoids the problematic digraphs combination found in both of them. The main drawback is that the other orthographies are already in wide usage and that by now it will be quite hard to get people to start writing Nauatl instead of Nahuatl.

Comparison of "Classical orthographies":

	IPA	Franciscan	Jesuit	ACK	Launey	Canger
”Nahuatl”	nawat͡ɬ	nauatl /nahuatl	nahuatl	nahuatl	nahuatl	nauatl
”He/she/it”	jeʔwat͡ɬ	yehuatl	yèhuatl	yehhuatl	yèhuatl	yehuatl
”we do it”	tikt͡ʃi:waʔ	ticchiua /ticchihua	nicchīhuâ	nicchīhuah	ticchīhuâ	ticchīuah /ticchīuâ

Modern orthographies: 

"Modern" orthographies also differ among themselves - but they share the principle that they aim for maximal efficiency rather than maximal continuity with colonial writing traditions. But efficiency can be measured in different ways that are not always compatible. One criterion of efficience might be simple graphic efficiency to have the smallest and most parsimonious array of graphic units  - for example following the principle of "one phoneme - one letter". This kind of "phonemic efficiency" would prefer to remove all the digraphic letters (tl, tz, ch, kw) so that no letter is used to represent two different phonemes and no phoneme is represented by two distinct typographic units. Another kind of efficiency would be to make sure that the orthography is maximally easy to learn - a kind of "pedagogical efficiency". Another kind of efficiency is to make sure that the orthography is maximally accessible to linguists - for example by using symbols for sound values that are internationally established in the linguistic community (e.g. in the same values as in the International Phonetic alphabet, or the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet). 

The Americanist orthography

The Americanist orthography stems from the earliest studies of contemporary spoken Nahuatl by American and Mexican US-trained linguists in the first half of the 20th century. They tended to use a phonetic notatoin system now known as APA (Americanist Phonetic Alphabet), which aimed towards being strictly phonemic and based on the principle of one letter per phoneme. Hence they used single letter symbols for all of the sounds that the "classical" orthographies represented with digraphs -

APA style transcription key:

• tl = ƛ
• tz = ¢ (or sometimes c)
• cu/qua = kw (or sometimes q)
• ch = č
• x = š
• c/qu = k
• hu/uh = w
• h = h
• ʔ = '

Americanist orthography is really very efficient in this way - except that it requires a bunch fo special symbols not found on ordinary keyboards. Hence many linguists taking a practical approach retained tl, ts, ch and x avoiding unnecessary additional signs apart from those already on a standard keyboard.

Such a modified Americanist orthography was in fact adopted as the official standard by the participants in the first Aztec Congress which was held in Milpa Alta in 1940 and attended by many native speakers. They stated that they prefered this orthography exactly because it didnt use the Spanish-style digraphs que/qui ce/za etc. In this way the choice of a "modern" and "scientific" orthography was a political move towards decolonization. Today a variant of this orthography (without the special symbols, but with k and w) is used by most Nahuatl speakers in the Zongolica region where the linguist Andrés Hasler has promoted it for several decades. 

SEP and SIL's orthographies

Example of the SEP/SIL orthography from a textbook.
It uses the letter j to represent the h sound.

In the 1940s an American missionary organization called Instituto Linguistico de Verano (Summer Institute of Linguistics or SIL) began collaborating with the Mexican Ministry of Education (SEP) to develop educational materials in indigenous languages. Because the government wanted indigenous peoples to learn Spanish and primarily wanted to use indigenous language education as a way to teach Spanish, they considered that the orthographies should only use letters already found in Spanish. They developed many different orthographies for different Nahuan varieties - some of which used the "classical" Spanish digraphs, and others which used k and w (although most use hu or simply u for [w]).  The only common denominator seems to be that they use the letter j for the saltillo when it is pronounced as an [h]. This presumably is because the letter <h> is "mute" in Spanish which migh confuse the children during the gradual transition from Nahuatl to Spanish. Today SIL still consider the ease of acquisition for students who are already literate in Spanish as the main criteria for efficiency. Most SEP/SIl orthographies do not mark vowel length, because most Nahuatl speakers are not actually aware of this feature of their language, and vowel length is not very important in distinguishing words from eachother. Some of them however do and when they do they tend to use either double vowels (aa/ee/ii/oo)  or underlining (a, e, i, o) to mark long vowels.

SEP and SIL style orthographies are extremely influential in Mexico and those Nahuatl speakers who have been lucky enough to have classes in their languages in school are likely to have learned them. Also most Nahuatl language authors tend to use these orthographies (because most of them are trained as bilingual teachers through SEP). Many SEP and SIL orthographies also do not write the double [ll] sound which is very common in Nahuatl but instead writes it as a single l. This is of course because Mexican Spanish pronounces the double l as the [j] sound (which is written with y in Nahuatl).

The drawback of using <j> to write the sound [h] is that it often causes non-Nahuatl speakers to erroneously pronounce it as the harsh Spanish j-sound and not as a soft h-sound. Writing the double l as a single-l is problematic from a grammatical viewpoint because the double-l is what happens when the absolutive suffix -tli occurs after a root ending in -l. So by writing only a single l, the grammatical structure of the language is obscured making it harder to teach the grammar. 

"Intuitive orthographies"

Example of intuitive orthpography form a kindergarten in Hueyapan. It says
"xi nech ate ki an xinech pojpua nochipan kion kual le ni koponis"
which usually would be written as
"xinechateki an xinechpojpoa nochipan kion kualle nikoponis"
which means
"Water me and weed me, that way I will always bloom"

Most Nahuatl speakers have not received any education in Nahuatl and many have never even been aware that their language can be written down. Usually Mexican schools teach only Spanish. This means that they have to invent new conventions almost from scratch (or based on Spanish) when they start writing their language since they havent been taught any of the existing orthographic conventions. These new Nahuatl-writers tend to adopt ways of writing that are intuitive to them based on their knowledge of Spanish and sometimes English orthography. Such intuitive orthographies can be seen on the internet where Nahuatl speakers sometimes converse in writing withouth ever having been taught how to write their language. These orthographies are often  sinmilar to the SEP orthographies (using j for h) - but two new features that are not used in any of the established orthographies are often found in intuitive Nahuatl writing. One is that they often use <sh> instead of the traditional <x> to write the sh-sound. This is probably because most Mexicans are associate this sound with English, and know that it is written sh in the English orthography. The second is that they often write grammatical prefixes as separate words, instead of fusing them together as Nahuatl grammarians do. This is probably because they often think in Spanish when they write in Nahuatl translating from Spanish into Nahuatl and therefore isolating elements of meaning the way it is done in Spanish.

Comparison of Modern Orthographies:

	IPA	APA	Hasler /Modern	SEP1	SEP2	Intuitive
”Nahuatl”	nawat͡ɬ	nawaƛ	nahuatl	nauatl	nahuatl	nauatl
”we do it”	tikt͡ʃi:waʔ	tikči:wa’	tikchiwah	tikchiuaj	ticchiihuaj	tic chiua
Jump!	ʃit͡sekwini	ši¢ekwini	xitsekuini	xitsekuini	xitsecuini	shi tsecuini

Note that the SEP1 and SEP2 and the "intuitive" orthography are just possible examples, but many different combinations of the different choices exist.

So Which One Should You Use?

There is no objective answer. Each orthography comes from different ideas about what is important, and is used by certain communities working within specific genealogies and traditions.

That fact of the matter is that regardless of which orthography you use someone will inevitably tell you that you are using the wrong one. I think the best approach is to learn to read all of them and to use one consistently. But really as I noted consistency is overrated. Shakespeare and Chaucer and Cervantes were able to found their national literatures without using standardized orthographies. Molina and Sahagun were able to found Nahuatl literature without one. The important part is that we keep writing and reading in Nahuatl.

English	Now I have told how one writes in the Nahuatl language
IPA	aʃka:n onikiɁtoɁ ke:nin se:  t͡ɬakwilo:s i:ka nawat͡ɬaɁtolli
APA	aška:n oniki’to’ ke:nin se: ƛa’kwilo:s i:ka nawaƛa’tolli
Franciscan	axcan oniquito quenin ce tlacuiloz ica nahuatlahtolli
Jesuit-Carochi-Launey	axcān oniquìtô quēnin cē tlàcuilōz īca nahuatlàtolli
ACK	axcān oniquihtoh quēnin cē tlahcuilōz īca nahuatlahtolli
SEP SEP2	axcan oniquijtoj quenin se tlajcuilos ica nahuatlajtoli axkan onikijtoj kenin se tlajkuilos ika nahuatlahtoli
Modern/Hasler	axkan onikihtoh kenin se tlahkuilos ika nawatlahtolli
Intuitive	ashkan onik itoh kenin se tlacuilos ica nahua tlajtoli

(Note: This post was edited on July 31st 2016 to make some minor corrections to the section on the ACK orthography based on comments from Frances Karttunen on the Nahuatl-l listserver)

Nahuatl one-word poems - guestblog by Ben Leeming

I am very happy to present a guestblog by Ben Leeming, a Nahuatl scholar who works mostly on Christian religious texts in colonial Nahuatl. He recently published an article on "Nahuatl Micro Poetry", in which he argues that the grammatical structure of Nahuatl and the ability to make very long words, enabled Nahua poets to create one-word poems: a single long word with the sense of aesthetics and wonder and the complex structure of an entire poem. These "hypertrophic" words, would probably not have been used in normal spoken conversation, but since they follow the grammatical rules of the language, poets could exploit the grammar to "unfurl" words for their listeners. Here Ben summarizes of his article as a blog post: 

 ‘Micro poetry’: One-word poems
drawn from colonial Nahuatl texts

by

Ben Leeming

Nahua Poetry:

When Europeans first came into contact with Aztec (Nahua) civilization in the early 16^th century, they found a rich and ancient tradition of verbal art that in certain ways approximated western notions of poetry. For example, the genre referred to as cuicatl (lit. “song”) was rich in metaphorical language, often involved the repetition of words and phrases, and was organized into lines and verses. Franciscans like fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who was among the first European observers to appreciate the poetry of the Nahuas, wrote down examples that today are preserved in texts like the Primeros memoriales. However, literate Nahuas also continued to compose traditional cuicatl, much of it contained in the anonymous texts known as the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la nueva españa. All three of these texts exist in modern translations and make very worthwhile reading; see the list of sources at the end of this post for more information. To get a feel for Nahuatl poetry, here are a few verses from the Romances text:

Your flowers blossom as bracelets, swelling as jades, the petals abounding, they lie in our hands. These fragrant plume flowers are our adornment, you princes. Aya! We only borrow them on earth.

Let the popcorn flowers, the raven flowers be scattered, and fragrant plume flowers lie in our hands. They are our adornment, you princes. Aya! We only borrow them on earth.

I, Tizahuatzin, am grieving here. Where are we to go? To His home! There can be no coming back, there can be no return. We go away forever. Beyond is where we go.

Let these flowers, these songs be carried from his home. And would that I might go away adorned. Gold raven flowers, plume popcorn flowers lie in our hands. There can be no return. We go away forever. Beyond is where we go.

  [Bierhorst 2009:131]

I’ve long been fascinated by the religious writing of early colonial Nahuas. Trained in alphabetic literacy by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, Nahuas enthusiastically embraced reading and writing in Spanish, Latin, and their language of birth, Nahuatl. Certain members of this cohort assisted the friars in composing religious texts in their native tongue, some which were translated from Spanish or Latin, others that were composed from scratch in the scriptoria of the various monastic houses. One of the cherished cultural forms that Nahua writers sought to incorporate into their Christian writing was characteristic traits of pre-Hispanic Nahuatl poetry. The friars supported this, at least in theory, since it lent an air of authenticity and prestige to the Christian message. One of the foremost hallmarks of Nahuatl poetry was the frequent use of couplets – pairs of words that together embellished the idea being communicated. Sometimes this pair of words could take on a third, metaphorical meaning, a kind of “semantic couplet” that is often referred to as a difrasismo. For example, the pairing of the words in xochitl and in cuicatl (“flower” and “song”) signified poetry. Other well-known difrasismos include: in atl in tepetl (“water, hill” rendering “town”), in teoatl in tlachinolli (“ocean, burned field” rendering “war”), and in cueitl in huipilli (“skirt, blouse” rendering “woman”). As is seen in the verses from the Romances text above, Nahuatl poetry often employs “vocables” (words without meaning, like Aya!) and refrains (“We only borrow them on earth”). Finally, Nahuatl poetry tends to draw on imagery from the “flower world” complex – iridescent tropical birds, reflective metals, brightly colored flowers, and all their associated sensory components – sounds, sights, and smells. To Nahuas, these were manifestations of teotl, the all-pervading power that animated all living (and some un-living) things.

The friars sought to carefully supervise all writing by native people, fearing the transmission of ideas deemed “diabolical” from indigenous cultures into the “one true faith” they had brought. But the act of translation is far more complicated than merely finding equivalences between two languages. Translating Christian concepts into indigenous tongues necessarily shaped and molded those concepts by virtue of the “stickiness” of language. For example, when friars sought an equivalent Nahuatl word for “God” they chose teotl. On one level this fit because it was one of the words Nahuas had used to refer to their deities. However, how does one “unstick” indigenous understandings of the divine from the word teotl and stick on to it a new, Christian one? One strategy they employed was to modify the word teotl with the Spanish word “Dios.” Teotl Dios was a way of saying, “the Christian teotl.” However, it proved very difficult – at least for quite a long time – to unstick the old meanings and attach new ones. Nahua Christianities (many regional varieties resulted from the translation project) tended to borrow heavily from new and old in an effort to make the new faith work within native cultural frameworks that had developed over millennia.

Megawords and Micropoetry:

Nahua writers could get very creative with their use of language, whether it be in their incorporation of difrasismos and other metaphorical expressions or their use of the “flower world” imagery described above. Although it wasn’t always true, generally speaking the less ecclesiastical supervision a writer was under the more creative his writing would become. In my work with colonial Nahuatl texts I am drawn to such texts, for they often contain bursts of creativity that might otherwise have been squelched by critical friars. Some native writers of religious texts displayed remarkable linguistic ingenuity in their effort to elevate the tone of their compositions and express their devotion to the saints, Mary, and Christ. Here’s a example of very florid devotional writing by a Nahua who penned these lines in a prayer of praise to the Virgin Mary:

You, oh vessel of jade-green water, from you will flow forth, will drip forth the heavenly jade-green water of life, so that with utterly good water all the world will be watered, so that in a sacred way will germinate, will sprout that which was frozen with the ice of sin. Oh, may you rejoice, oh Saint Mary, oh pure and forever maidenly flower…you are the finely emblazoned jade-green water vessel. [Burkhart 2001:55]

Notice in this example the author’s use of couplets (“will flow forth, will drip forth” and “will germinate, will sprout”) as well as the reference to “jade-green” water, jade being a precious greenstone associated with the shimmering phenomena of the flower world. One additional way this writer displays his skill and devotion is by composing words of exceptional length. In the short passage above there are two of these: “oh pure and forever maidenly flower” and “you are the finely emblazoned jade-green water vessel.” Yes, these are single words. Here they are in their Nahuatl form:

chipahualizcemihcacaichpochxochitzintle

(“oh pure and forever maidenly flower”)

tiyecchalchiuhmatlalaacaxmachiotiltzintli

(“you are the finely emblazoned jade-green water vessel”)

Nahuatl is what is called an “agglutinative” language, which means that it forms words by adding prefixes and suffixes onto word stems. Each prefix and suffix adds more material to the stem, to the point where these words can function as entire sentences, as seen in the second example above. Nahua authors like those who composed these words pushed the limits of Nahuatl’s agglutinating nature, building words that could stretch to extreme lengths. Once I noticed this phenomenon, I became fascinated, both by the complexity of these words and by their obvious poetic value. When I studied them closely I made a startling discovery. Within the boundaries of certain of these words I observed the very characteristics of Nahuatl poetry that were common in entire lines and verses. After accumulating a database of examples and breaking each one down into its constituent parts, it became clear to me that what I was seeing were tiny, single-word poems – ‘micro poetry’ of astonishing beauty.

In order to explain how these words can be analyzed as poems, I will next share a few examples from my database. For each example I have first presented the word in Nahuatl followed by the translation of the publishing author. Then, I have presented the word again in two columns. The left-hand column presents the word broken into its individual parts and arranged vertically. Directly across from it is a more literal translation of each part. Finally, I offer a short commentary about each example.

Ex. 1:   tonecuiltonolnetlamachtiliztlahtocatzin

“our ruler of prosperity and happiness” (Burkhart translation)

to                                                         our

necuiltonol                                           prosperity

            netlamachtiliz                                      richness/happiness

tlahtohcatzin                                        ruler

This first Nahuatl micro-poem comes from an anonymous manuscript containing a variety of miscellaneous Christian texts of a devotional nature. Likely penned by a Nahua early in the seventeenth century, it forms part of a prayer to the Virgin Mary and refers to her son, Jesus Christ. My presentation above shows that the author has embedded a pair of noun stems within the boundaries of this lengthy word, forming an embedded couplet. Although these two words are nouns, when compounded in this manner they modify the primary noun (tlahtohcatzin) and take on an adjectival function, describing what kind of ruler Christ is. As I’ve already stated, the couplet is one of the most characteristic features of Nahuatl poetry. However, not all couplets were created equal. To enhance the beauty of such a pairing, the author of this word crafted a couplet with a strong parallel structure. By choosing noun stems that both begin with the prefix ne he formed a couplet that would have sounded especially pleasing to the Nahua ear. What I find so remarkable about this example is that we see the same propensity to form pairs here within single words as we see at the level of entire verses.

Ex. 2    tiquetzalçacuaxiuhquecholhuihuicomacan

“let's make troupial-and-turquiose swan plumes twirl” (Bierhorst translation)

            ti                                                          Let us [like]

                        quetzal                                                 quetzals

                        zaquan                                                 troupials

                        xiuhquechol                                         motmots

            hui                                                       climb up…

                 huicomacan                                                  …and up

This beautiful word (keep in mind: this is one word!) comes from one of the most important sources of colonial Nahuatl poetry, the so-called Cantares mexicanos. My presentation suggests that Bierhorst (a brilliant translator) may have missed the internal structuring of this word. Notice how his translation treats “troupial” and “turquoise swan” as types of feathers. However, “quetzal” can refer both to feathers and the bird that bears this name. Since troupials, “turquoise swans” (a species of motmot) and quetzals are all species of brightly-colored tropical birds common to flower world complex of poetic imagery, it seems to me far more likely that the author included the three as an embedded triplet modifying the verb huihuicomacan. The directional thrust of this verb (a command form of huicoma, “to climb”) is spiraling, upward motion. Based on the larger context of the verse in which this word-poem appears, I believe the composer was likening the spiraling flight of brightly colored birds with the rising of one’s spirit in song to God. This is a spectacular example of the melding of Christian practices with indigenous art forms, a phenomenon well documented in longer texts and here shown to operate at the level of single words.

Ex. 3    onquetzalchalchiuhtlapitzalicaoacatiaque 

“They went chirping like flutes of quetzal-green jade” (Burkhart translation)

on                                                                                            icahuacatiaque

                                    quetzal           ¯\

                                                                  >        tlapitzal                                   

                                    chalchiuh      _/

                                   

            they went                                                                                chirping

                                                quetzal feather

                                                                                    flute

                                                green stone

This beautiful word-poem appears in fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s cycle of songs composed for the feast of the Nativity and describes the sounds made by the angels attending Christ’s birth. I have formatted  my presentation of this word horizontally so as to better highlight its complex internal structure. The opening bracket is formed by Nahuatl’s outbound directional prefix on-, essentially a prefix that indicates the action is moving away from the speaker or subject. The closing bracket, the word being modified, is the verb icahuacatiaque “they went chirping.” Within these brackets the author has embedded three stems: quetzal- (“quetzal feather”), chalchiuh- (“green stone or jade”), and tlapitzal- (“flute”).  At first I was inclined to see these stems as forming an embedded triplet. However, there’s something more complicated going on here. Rather than all serving the same function, the embedded stems modify the verb icahuacatiaque at two different levels. The first level is represented by tlapitzal- (“flute”) which modifies the verb, basically saying that the angels “went chirping like flutes.” However, modifying this modifier is an embedded couplet,  quetzal- and chalchiuh-, which describes the appearance of the flute. However, this is no ordinary couplet. In fact, it is a difrasismo the metaphorical meaning of which is maize leaves or rain drops. In its pre-Hispanic usage this difrasismo alluded to the rain deity Tlaloc, a surprising reference in light of the Christian context of its use here! So far this is the only difrasismo I have identified within the confines of a single word poem. Given the centrality of this particular kind of couplet in Nahuatl poetry it stands as a striking example of the permeation of certain poetic features down to the smallest level.

Additional examples:

The examples below come from the database of single-word Nahuatl poems that I have collected over the years. Some of them contain clear evidence of the kind of internal poetic structuring demonstrated in the two examples above; others yield less easily to such analysis. However, all of them are shining examples of the sort of linguistic creativity exercised by early colonial Nahua writers. As single word poems, I find them exquisitely beautiful.

a.       teucuitlaquetzalaoachpixauhtoc         

trans: “A golden quetzal-colored dew formed drops” (Anderson translation)         

b.      tiquetzalçacuaxiuhquecholhuihuicomacan

“let us like quetzals, troupials and motmots climb up and up” (my translation)        

c.       celticachipahuacateoyoticaxochitzintle

trans: “O fresh and pure one who is in a sacred way a flower” (Burkhart translation)

d.      Nicchalchiuhcozcamecaquemmachtohtoma

“I gently unfurl [my song] as a precious green-stone string of beads” (my translation)

e.       tixochicitlalcuecuepocatimani

“you are bursting into bloom all over with stars like flowers” (Burkhart & Sell trans.)

f.       itlaçomahuizÇenquiscatlaçomahuizqualtilispepetlaquilisXayacatzin (Burkhart trans.)

“[his] precious, wondrous, utterly precious, wondrous, good, and shining face”

(note: This could be the longest word ever composed in colonial Nahuatl. It’s certainly the longest in my database.)

Conclusion:

What sense are we to make of this phenomenon? As for why certain Nahua authors composed such lengthy words, it’s important to note that not all of them did. For example, the massively long word above is, at its root, simply ixayaca “his face.” In the hands of some authors this might have remained in this short form, or perhaps ixayacatzin “his face” in reverential form. But given the ease with which Nahuatl could incorporate stems to form more complex constructions, this word could just as easily have grown to itlazohxayacatzin (“his precious face”), or even itlazohmahuizxayacatzin (“his precious, marvelous face”). Authors who chose to grow their words to extreme lengths probably did so as a way to demonstrate both their linguistic skill (their “chops,” as it were), but owing to the fact that these examples come almost exclusively from Christian devotional texts, also as a way of demonstrating their piety and devotion. I see these examples of Nahuatl word poetry as evidence of the persistence of pre-Hispanic oral tradition in the early colonial period. That age-old tradition prized the kind of spontaneous, improvisational, linguistic ebullience that I see preserved in the examples shared here. Singers of cuicatl were praised for “unfurling their songs,” performing in xochitl in cuicatl for their audience who likened their speech to “green-stone strings of beads” or the spiraling, upward motion of quetzals, troupials, and motmots. That native authors continued to “unfurl their songs” into the early contact period is no surprise, and to gaze on the fruits of their linguistic labors is one of the things I cherish most about working with colonial Nahuatl texts.  

Note: Readers who are interested in exploring Nahuatl “micro-poetry’ in greater detail should consult the article I published in Colonial Latin American Review, 24:2, pp. 168-189 (2015) titled “‘Micropoetics’: The poetry of hypertrophic words in early colonial Nahuatl.” 

References:

Nahuatl poetry in modern editions

Bierhorst, John, trans.  1985.  Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

___. 2009.  Ballads of the Lords of New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Garibay, Ángel María.  1964.  Poesía Náhuatl.  Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma

de México.

Sullivan, T.D. and Nicholson, H.B., eds. 1997. Primeros Memoriales by fray Bernardino de

Sahagún: Paleography of Nahuatl Text and English Translation. University of Oklahoma Press.

Christian texts that incorporate aspects of Nahuatl poetry

Burkhart, Louise  M.  1992.  “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetic of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional

Literature.”  RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 21:88-109.

_____.  2001.  Before Guadalupe.  Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1993 [1583].  Psalmodia Christiana, translated by Arthur J.O.

Anderson.  Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Sell, Barry D. and Louise M. Burkhart, eds.  2004.   Nahuatl Theater, Vol. 1. University of

Oklahoma Press.