Salt and Whiteness: The etymology of white stuff in Nahuan

This post arises from a conversation I had yesterday with R. Joe Campbell, who is one of the world's great Nahuatl scholars as well as an amazingly knowledgeable and kind man, whom I have had the great fortune to get to know when I lived in the US. Joe is working on a major analytical database that analyzes the morphology of all of the words in Alonso de Molina's dictionary. For that reason he is extremely interested in finding out how all of the thousands of Nahuatl words in the dictionary can best be analyzed. This often leads to interesting questions. 

The question of today's debate is this: Is the Nahuatl adjective istāk that names the color white, derived from istatl the noun meaning "salt"; or is the noun 'salt' derived from the adjective 'white'?

The question is relevant because it has ramifications for how we understand some basic things about Nahuatl grammar. 

In Nahuatl there is a clear tendency for color words to be derived from nouns that describe something with a particular color. This is of course very common in the world's languages: "orange" being an obvious example of this in English. In Nahuatl, many color names like are similarly derived.  The word chichiltik "red" is transparently derived from the word chilli "chili", and the color word tlīltik "black" is derived from the word tlīlli 'ink/soot'. Indeed in modern Nahuatl, one can productively derive new color terms by using the suffix -tik which produces an adjective with the sense of "like X". So nēxtik "like ashes" can mean 'grey', cafēntik "like coffee" or chocolatik "like chocolate" can mean "brown". And sometimes color words are even borrowed from Spanish with the -tik suffix, so that azultik is used for 'blue' in several dialects that I have encountered.  

This -tik suffix is generally regarded as a kind of participial form where the -k is the preterit ending describing a completed action, and the -ti- morpheme is related to the intransitive version of the causative (sort of like an inchoative) that means 'to become' (e.g. in tlākati "to be born" composed of tlāka "human" and -ti). This means, interestingly, that apparently denominal adjectives in Nahuatl are in fact deverbal, since the noun has to be "verbed" before the adjective can be derived. Many other adjectival verbs are derived from verbs using only the preterit ending -k, forexample tomāwak 'fat', and chikāwak 'strong' respectively derived from the inchoative verbs tomāwa  'to become fat' and chikāwa 'to become strong'.  

But not all denominal adjectives have the -tik ending, and nor do all color words. Notably the word for 'white' istāk , does not, but seems to have a simple -k suffix that is added to the stem ista- 'salt' producing the same effect as the -tik suffix. Other tik-less adjectives are xokok 'sour' (related to xokotl 'fruit'), kokok 'spicy' (related to kokoa 'hurt'), sesēk 'cold' (related to setl "ice" or to sēwa ''be cold ). This challenges us to think about how the derivational process works in these cases, where the noun does not seem to have been verbalized before derivation, but where the denominal adjective nevertheless carries the preterit marker -k. 

Joe's proposal for how to deal with this is that the noun has indeed been verbalized, but that the verbalizing morpheme has been deleted. His argument goes like this: 

There is another verbalizing suffix in Nahuatl which is -ya, and it also gives an inchoative meaning 'to become X' or 'to make x Y'. For example from the adjective itztik 'cold' (maybe related to the noun itztli 'obsidian'), one can derive a deadjectival verb itztiya 'to become cold', and then one may form a participle with the preterit suffix -k so we get itztiyak 'cold' (but in a sense of "cooled down", implying that it was hot before). There is also such a verb derived from istatl 'salt', namely istaya 'to become salty'. 

So what if, Joe proposes, there is a grammatical rule that allows the -ya- to be deleted, so that itztik really is a shortened form of itztiyak, and istāk really is a shortened form of istayak. This would explain the seemingly non-verbalized adjectives derived from nouns. 

My argument is that this assumption is unnecessary, and in fact contradicted by the etymological evidence regarding the words for 'white' and 'salt' in Nahuatl. 

Let me give a bit of theoretical context for my disagreement: 

Nahuatl is of course a Uto-Aztecan language, and to understand the history of words one should not look only at the productive derivational processes in the language, but also at other related languages to reconstruct the deep history of the language. 

Nahuatl did not emerge as a fully formed context-free grammatical system of generative processes that derive words through well-defined rules from a well-defined set of lexical items. Rather, it developed gradually and incrementally through phonological and grammatical alterations caused by speakers interacting with each other, borrowing from each other, and imitating each others ways of using the language.  It is simply unrealistic to expect to be able to explain all vocabulary through synchronic grammatical processes. Rather we should invoke the historical process to explain the anomalies and irregularities that all languages have.

Let me now describe how the Nahuatl words for salt and white relate to the same words in other Uto-Aztecan languages.

Salt
Nahuatl:  istatl
Huichol: únaa
Cora: uná
Yaqui: óna
Tarahumara: oná
Northern Tepehuán: ónai
Shoshone: oŋa

Here we see that all the Uto-Aztecan languages have the word 'salt' derived from a single root that can be reconstructed as *ona. Nahuatl is the only Uto-Aztecan language to have a word for salt from a different root. This is not odd of course, Nahuatl could for example have borrowed its word for 'salt' from another language, or have innovated it from some other root.  


White:
Nahuatl:  istāk 
Huichol: tuxa
Northern Tepehuán: tóha
Yaqui: tosa'i
Tarahumara: tosakame
Shoshone: tosa

Here Nahuatl again appears to be the odd one out, but in fact Nahuatl istak is cognate to the other Uto-Aztecan words for "white". What happened in Nahuatl is that when a word of the shape CVCV had the accent on the second syllable, then the vowel in the first syllable was weakened to the point of dissappearing - after which an prothetic i- was inserted infront of the consonant cluster: so Nahuatl followed this development: tòsá > tsa > itsa. "Oh, but that gives *itsa and not the desired ista", I hear you object. And you are right, but when the vowel syncope produces a cluster of certain consonants, the two consonants then switch places through a metathesis. This happens particularly with the cluster /ts/ which regularly metathesizes to /st/ after the syncope, perhaps to avoid confusion with the affricate phoneme /ʦ/. (Another example of this syncope with subsequent metathesis is the word for 'cave' ostotl which comes from Uto-Aztecan *tɨso  through the process *tɨso  > tso > itso > isto > osto). So while the word for salt in Nahuatl is not related to the uto-Aztecan root for salt, the word for white is related and clearly derives from the ancient root *tosa. Nahuatl also has another word derived from the same root, but without syncope and metathesis, namely tīsatl 'chalk'. Here we must assume that the proto language had two versions of *tosa distinguished by the placement of the accent, namely *tòsá "white" and *tósà "chalk" - the accentuated *ó developed into i, while the unaccentuated *ò was weakened and lost, producing the consonant cluster that subsequently underwent metathesis.

On this ground alone, even though it is not a very common process in the world's languages, we can conclude that the noun meaning 'salt' in Nahuatl is derived from the adjective "white", and not the other way round. At some point speakers of Nahuatl stopped referring to salt as 'ona', and instead started calling it "white stuff". And other speakers of Nahuatl liked this new way of talking about salt so much that they all began doing it, and eventually forgot the word 'ona' had ever existed.

This, however, also means that we still have to explain the -k ending, which then cannot really be considered a participial ending, as this would require the root to be verbalized.

Here comes my attempt at an explanation:

Whenever we learn a language, whether as children or adults, the main task is to observe and understand the different patterns of the language in a way that allows us to produce utterances that other speakers will understand. When we hear what others say, they can help us understand by using constructions that we have heard before, and that we can therefore be expected to understand. And when we speak we do the same to allow others to understand us. Irregularities hinder this process, and therefore we tend to over time convert irregular patterns to regular ones. This process is called analogy. 

Speakers of Nahuatl have used a set of patterns to help themselves distinguish well between different parts of their language. The final segment of a word tends to give a clear hint to the listener about whether the word is a verb, a noun or something else. Nahuatl has two major open word classes: verbs and nouns (and then some minor closed word classes such as particles, and a small class of true adjectives). Because Nahuatl has very free wordorder, it is helpful to be able to recognize words as nouns or verbs by their phonological form.

Verb stems always end in a vowel, and this vowel is usually a, less frequently i, very rarely o, and never e. Most nouns end with the absolutive suffix that has the most frequent form -tl/-tli. Perfective forms, both verbal and participial (participals of cours ebeing sort of mid-way between verbs and nouns), end with -k or -ki. 

In Nahuatl adjectives form an odd word class, since adjectives may be 'verby' either by being derived from verbs or by being participial forms of verbs. Others are 'nouny' and take nominal morphology (for example kwalli 'good' which originated a nominal form of the verb 'eat', and originally meant 'edible'). And yet others are neither verby or nouny (the ones we could call "true adjectives"): for example wēwe 'old', wēyi 'big'. Most adjectives however are verby participials ending in -k or -ki. This ambiguity, where a single class of words is a kind of irregularity that makes it harder for listeners to cognitively process utterances, because there is no overt mark associated with adjectives. This is the kind of situation that can cause processes of analogical change to kick in, by enforcing the dominant pattern on the irregular cases. The dominant pattern is that adjectives end in -k or -ki.

What I propose is therefore that the class of true adjectives was originally unmarked in the Uto-Aztecan languages, as is also the case in most of the languages today. But speakers of Nahuatl began to derive adjectives deverbally as participials creating a huge class of adjectives ending in -k. They then started gradually extending the -k pattern also to those true adjectives that originally ended in a vowel (and therefore looked verby) making them more recognizably adjective. 

ista 'white' became istāk 
yankwi 'new' became yankwik 
yeti 'heavy' became yetik 
koko 'spicy' became kokok
xoko 'sour' became xokok
yawi 'blue' became yawik 

In processes of analogical change often the most frequently used words are the ones that are the last to become assimilated to the regular pattern. This seems to be exactly what we see in Nahuatl, as wēyi, kwalli and wēwe are among the most frequently used adjectives. Perhaps in the future they will become *wēyik, *kwallik and *wēwek. 

It is interesting to think that perhaps istatl is not the only noun derived from an adjective: xokotl 'fruit' might originally have meant "something sour", and yawitl 'blue corn' might originally have meant "something blue". There is no word *kokotl in Nahuatl witha meaning similar to "something spicy" (kokotl in fact means "pimple"), but the word for chile in Corachol and other Southern Uto-Aztecan languages is kukuri where the -ri could well be considered equivalent to the Nahua absolutive suffix -tli. Perhaps Nahuatl used this same word *kokotl or *kokol in the meaning chile, before introducing the word chilli.

The point of it all is a reminder that even though Nahuatl is a language with an insane amount of productive morphology, where derivations can be stacked upon derivations, back and forth between the categories - that does not necessarily mean that everything can be (or should be) explained through synchronic processes and grammatical rules. Even as we strive to accurately describe the different grammatical processes that operate in the Nahuatl language, we must remember that it is not in fact the grammatical rules that determine how people speak, but rather, it is, the ways in which people speak that produce the rules of grammar.

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)

Tongues of Aztlan: The Nahua migrations and dialectology

In my last post I showed the basic split between eastern and western Nahuatl dialects, and how different dialects could be classified as belonging to either of the two branches. In this post I summarize a talk I gave at the Mesoamerican conference at CalState L.A. this past saturday, in which I gave my interpretation of the history of migrations that brought the Nahuas to their current locations from their ancestral homeland.

My narrative is based on three avenues of evidence:

1. Linguistic evidence. By analyzing how the structure of shared linguistic innovations between dialects reflect historical relationships and splits, give us a way to understand how ancestral dialect groups moved, split and moved again. 
2. Ethnohistorical evidence. By analyzing accounts told by the Nahuas about their own past we can find clues to how they themselves understood the relaiton between groups of speakers and their historical and geographic relations.
3. Archeological evidence. By analyzing material culture in different locations we can trace population movements and cultural innovations or changes. 

There are several different views of where the Nahuan languages originated:

Terrence Kaufman 2001 thinks the proto-Nahuan language must have been spoken somewhere North of the Huasteca region in Tamaulipas or San Luis Potosi before entereing the basin of Mexico where according to his interpretation they the Western group split off.  His main argument for this location is what he sees as loanwords in proto-Nahuan from Wastek/Huastec Mayan (Teenek) and the Otomanguean language Pame. 

Christensen and Beekman 2003, rather see the homeland in the Bajio region of Zacatecas, Jalisco, Aguacalientes and Queretaro. This view they base on the fact tha they have archeologically documented a large population movement out of this region into central Mexico starting in about 500AD. 

Other, less well supported suggestions for the location of the ancestral Proto-Nahuan speech community include the coast of Nayarit and even Durango/Sonora/Chihuahua. I follow Christensen and Beekman, both because I disagree with Kaufman regarding the Teenek influence in proto-Nahuan which I find negligible, and also because my own investigations have found more commonalities between Nahuan and Cora (Naayerite) and Huichol (Wixarika), suggesting to me a more westerly origin in contact with these languages. My interpretation of contact in Nahuan prehistory is thus more consonant with Christensen and Beekman than with Kaufman's account. 

This then, using the three kinds of evidence and the Bajio as a place of origin, provides us with the following narrative: 

Late Classic (500-600AD):

By the late classic Speakers of Eastern Nahuatl are entering Mesoamerica from the Bajio, drawn by the metropolis of Teotihuacan. They settle in a broad area across the central highlands from the Huastec region to Guererro. Possibly the Huastec and Guerrero branches already split from the other Eastern languages - or mor likely they formed a dialect continuum, which was only subsequently broken apart.

Epiclassic (600-800AD):

Then at the fall of Teotihuacan around 600AD the demographic weight of Central Mexico shifts towards the new centers of Cholula/Cacaxtla, and Xochicalco. Here Eastern Nahuas come into contact with Maya speakers - Maya influence in the Cholula region in this period is well documented. Perhaps, including the ancestors of the Teenek Maya people, if we assume that they had not yet arrived in their current location (this is in contrast to Kaufman's view of Huastecs arriving in their current position much earlier than that, but consonant with Robertson and Houston's argument for a much later Huastec migration). Cholula is one of the centers from which the religion based around the worship of Quetzalcoatl spreads, southeast in to the Maya region and west into the highlands.

Early Post-Classic (800-1000)

In this period Western Nahuas, who had stayed behind in contact with Naayerite, Wixarika and Otomi people move into Central Mexico settling at the site of Tula, Hidalgo. Previous scholars such as Una Canger 1988 and Terrence Kaufman have seen Tula as a center of dispersal of Eastern Nahuatl. I disagree, since I consider this date to be much too late, and because there are no Eastern varities spoken in the area of Tula, only Western ones and Otomi. Kaufman consider the Otomies to be a later intrusion in the area - I know of no convincing evidence for this. Rather I think that clearly the Western Nahuas were closely aligned with Otomies (e.g. the Acolhua of Texcoco were multiethnic Otomi-Nahuas even in the14th century), and probably Tula, was composed of both Otomi and Nahua populations. The many important calques between Otomi and Nahua described by David Wright Carr, date to this period, and I believe a number of loans in both directions as well.

Then after settling in Tula, the Western Nahuas who use /ahmo/ as their only negation word, move into the Central Mexico Valley and arrive in Cholula. Here they rout the Eastern Nahuas and Mayas who live there, and make them flee towards the gulf coast, towards the province of Olman-Xicallanco. This event is suggested by the account in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca which tells us about the invasion of Tolteca-Chichimeca who rout the Olmeca-Xoiclanca from Cholula. It is also supported by the work of Geoffrey McCafferty whose excavations at Cholula have demonstrated warfare and a change in the material culture of the site around the time of the entry of the Eastern Nahuas (his Olmeca-Xicallanca) in the 7th century and at the time of the entry of the Western Nahuas (his Tolteca-Chichimeca) in the 9th century. My argument here is that the Olmeca-Xicallanca only came into existence when they left Cholula, for Olman-Xicallanco - that is they were named after the destination where they went after leaving Cholula, and not for their origin before arriving there. The arrival of the Western Nahuas split the Eastern Nahuas into three groups - the Isthmian group who settled the gulf coast of southern Veracruz and well into Tabasco, and the North-Eastern Huastec-Nahuas who settled in the Sierra Huasteca.  The Sierra de Puebla varieties also split off at this time. The Isthmian and Sierra de Puebla groups subsequently changed /tl/ to /t/, developed new grammatical strategies for negation, and began dropping their /y/s wordinitially before /e/.  Perhaps the fact that one of the Eastern group of Nahuas the Isthmians, changed their /tl/ to  /t/ is due to Maya influence, since there is no /tl/ sound in Mayan, and Maya speakers must have found it hard to pronounce. The Isthmian Nahuas, also seem to have had the closest ties to the Chontal Mayas in the Tabasco region where both languages are still spoken in close contact.

Another group of Western Nahuas split from the central group going into Mexico state, backtracking towards the pacific coast and north into Michoacan, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit and Durango. They became the Western Peiphery. They are characterized by a frequent if sporadic change of /tl/ to /l/, and the use of -lo for the plural subject, and a number of other innovations. 

Postclassic: 1000-1500AD

The Postclassic period sees the continued dominance of Western Nahuas centered in the Mexico Valley, the rise of Azcapotzalco, and later the triple alliance. During this period Western features extend into most of the historically Eastern varieties, creating a zone of diffusion in the central Nahua speaking area  (from the sierra Zongolica across Southern Puebla into Morelos and Central Guerrero) where Western and Eastern traits mingle freely. With the rise of Tenochtitlan, Western influence reaches its maximum extent and, except for Pipil which has by then reached in El Salvador and Guatemala, no Eastern varieties escape being influenced by Western Nahuatl.

Conclusions:

This narrative leads us to the current distribution with clearly demarcated Western and Eastern peripheries, and a large central diffusion area marked by dialect mixture and koineization (as suggested by Canger 2011).  My narrative builds on and is largely consonant with most other studies, and mostly differ in the timing and in the identification of Tula as the center of the Western dispersal and Cholula as the center of Eastern dispersal. 

Bibliography:

Canger, U. (1988). Nahuatl dialectology: A survey and some suggestions.International Journal of American Linguistics, 28-72.

Canger, U. (2011). El nauatl urbano de Tlatelolco/Tenochtitlan, resultado de convergencia entre dialectos: Con un esbozo brevísimo de la historia de los dialectos. Estudios de cultura Náhuatl, 42, 243-258.

Canger, U., & Dakin, K. (1985). An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl.International journal of American linguistics, 358-361.

Kaufman, T. (2001). The history of the Nawa language group from the earliest times to the sixteenth century: Some initial results. Paper posted online at http://www. albany. edu/anthro/maldp/Nawa. pdf. University of Pittsburgh.

Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2009). Historical linguistics and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica, 20(02), 221-231.

Robertson, J., & Houston, S. (2015). The Huastec Problem. in Faust, K. A., & Richter, K. N. (Eds.). (2015). The Huasteca: Culture, History, and Interregional Exchange. University of Oklahoma Press.

McCafferty, G. G. (1996). Reinterpreting the great pyramid of Cholula, Mexico.Ancient Mesoamerica, 7(01), 1-17.

McCafferty, G. G. (1996). The ceramics and chronology of Cholula, Mexico.Ancient Mesoamerica, 7(02), 299-323.

Carr, D. C. W. (2008). La Sociedad Prehispánica en las Lenguas Náhuatl y Otomí◊. Acta Universitaria, 18(Esp), 15-23.