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.

Tabasco Nawat: A *not* extinct Nahuan variety

According to The Ethnologue, the world's largest catalogue of languages and dialects, the Nahuatl language of Tabasco is extinct - it no longer has any living speakers. [UPDATE: As of today 2/22/2015, two days after I posted this blog, Ethnologue has updated their listing of Tabasco Nahuatl, no longer categorizing it as extinct, and noting a population of 30.]

The Maya ruins of Comalcalco.
 Twenty minutes from where Nawat is still spoken.
Maya and Nawat has long coexisted in Tabasco, and also Ayapa Zoque
 is spoken within a ten minute drive.
Fermin's neighbor in fact speaks Chontal Maya.

This is something that would probably concern Fermín Cruz Álvarez and some 30-40 of his neighbors and family members in his community in the municipality of Comalcalco, Tabasco, since this is the language they grew up speaking. It is also the language that Fermín has spent his free time trying to promote the past 7 years. He has been teaching the language to youths and adults, and with the help of several linguists he wrote and published a small dictionary through CDI (Comisión del Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas).

So the Tabasco Nahuatl language is not extinct. It does have native speakers, although there are very few of them, and the language is in imminent risk of disappearing unless someone assists Fermín and the community. His efforts to revive his language are hampered by the fact that he has to work, cultivating cacao, black pepper and fish to sustain his family, and that he receives little or no remuneration for his work.

Fermin Cruz with his daughter,
who already knows the numbers
 up to ten in Tabasco Nawat

I visited Fermin in the summer of 2014, and the rest of this blog post is dedicated to giving a brief sketch of Tabasco Nawat, and to argue that this is an imminently interesting and important variety of Nawat that really deserves support and recognition. And if you read all the way to the end, you will get a chance to listen to what the language sounds like and read a small sample text of Fermin telling about how to make cacao.

Some Background:

Nahua people have a long history in the south-east of Mexico. It probably arrived in Tabasco sometime before 800 AD, as Nahua speakers migrated south from Central Mexico along the gulf coast, through Chiapas, and Guatemala and into Central America. At the time of the Spanish invasion, Nahuan languages were spoken all along the gulf coast of Veracruz and into Tabasco, where the language coexisted with Mixe-Zoquean and Mayan languages. The municipality of Comalcalco, Tabasco is the location of an important classical period Mayan archaeological site, also named Comalcalco, which was probably built by the Chontal maya people who still inhabit the area. The Ayapa Zoque language, which has become famous because of a media hyped story about two of its last fluent speakers, is spoken less than fifteen minutes from Fermín's house by car. Tabasco has always been an important area in Mesoamerica – it was here that the Olmec culture flourished in the pre-classic period, and in the classic and post-classic periods it was an important site of trade, because of the abundance of Cacao and other tropical luxury goods. Comalcalco is itself a Nahuatl name, meaning “In the house of comales”, the comal being the round ceramic griddle used by many Mesoamericans for baking tortillas on.

Tabasco Nawat:

The small family of Nahuan languages has two main branches: The Western branch includes most of the dialects spoken in the Center of Mexico and on the Pacfific coast in Michoacan and in Durango, and historically in Jalisco, Zacatecas and Colima. The Eastern branch includes the Huastecan dialects spoken in north-eastern Mexico, and the dialects of central Puebla, and Southern Veracruz, as well as the Pipil Nawat language spoken in El Salvador – and many varieties that are no longer spoken such as those of Chiapas and Guatemala. The Tabasco variety belongs to the Eastern branch. Some of the characteristics of the Eastern branch is that they use the pronouns neha/naha ”I”, teha/taha “you” and yeha/yaha “he/she”. They also do not use the word “ahmo” as the only negation word, and most Eastern varieties do not use ahmo at all (Pharao Hansen 2014). And they are also characterized by having the vowel /i/ in a number of words where Western Nahuan has /e/ (Canger & Dakin 1985), and by only using the plural morpheme -meh or -met and not the of the morpheme -tin which is used in most Western varieties. Tabasco Nawat, along with the Nahuan languages of Central Puebla, Southern Veracruz, and the Pipil Nawat language of El Salvador also do not use the tl-sound which is such a famous characteristic of the so-called Classical Nahuatl language and most of the Nahuan languages spoken in the Center of Mexico, but instead have changed all their previous tl's to t. That is why I write Tabasco Nawat and not Tabasco Nawatl. This is not a feature shared by all the Eastern varieties, as for example Huastecan Nahuatl still has the /tl/ sound.

In terms of phonology, apart from the lack of /tl/ another interesting feature is that Tabasco Nawat has five vowel qualities /i, e, a, o, u/. Most other Nahuan languages have only four vowel qualities, as they do not have the vowel /u/ or if they have /u/ then they don't have o. But Tabasco Nawat has both. This is because it has not changed all its o's to /u/, but only some of them following a rule that I have not yet been able to fully work out. It seems that particularly long /o:/'s have become /u/. The language has not changed its final stop consonants /t/ and /k/ to glottal stops as has happened in the nearby Nahuan languages of southern Veracruz, and it has /h/ where “Classical Nahuatl” has the saltillo. It also voices the velar stop /k/ to /g/ both between vowels and even frequently at the beginning of words. Tabasco Nawat also has the sound /f/ corresponding to the consonant cluster /hw/ in other dialects. For example the word “feather” which in some other dialects is /ihwitl/ in Tabasco Nawat is /ifit/ (this is not uncommon in other varieties either, and is found both in Morelos and Zongolica).

Interestingly Tabasco Nawat also has a morphophonological process that turns /w/ into /n/ whenever it appears at the end of a word. For example the past tense of the verb /chowa/ “to do” is [ogichin] “he did it” (also note that the vowel varies, the /w/ having colored the /i/ to [o], but since the n does not color the preceding vowel the past form retains the vowel /i/. This strongly suggests that the rule turning /w#/ to /n#/ is old, or at least older than the change of /i/ to /o/). And when nouns take the possessive suffix that is /w/ in most other dialects here it is /-n/, for example “my wife” is /no-soa-n/, and “my name” is /no-tu:ga-n/. This morpho-phonological rule is shared with the dialects of Morelos and (some of) the dialects of the Zongolica region in Veracruz. It is kind of weird that this would be shared between these two areas, that are otherwise both linguistically and geographically quite far removed, and changing /w/ to /n/ is not so common in the languages of the world that one would expect it to appear independently (changes such as the voicing of [k] to [g] and the fusion of [hw] to [f] are much more common changes, and very likely to occur independently of each other in different varieties).

But the really interesting differences between Tabasco Nawat and other varieties are in the grammar of the language – both in the areas of morphology and syntax.

One really interesting aspect, is how plural subjects are marked. In most Nahuan languages plural subjects are marked on verbs using a suffix /-h/ or /Ɂ/. But this is not the case in Tabasco Nawat. Here  plural subject is unmarked for the third person, but marked with -lo for the first person, e.g. ti-k-pia-lo "we are guarding it", but ti-k-pia "you are guarding it". 

The language also doesnt have a  future tense with the suffix -s as in most other varieties, rather future is constructed with the suffix -tiin which in other varieties means "to be going to do X". Negation is expressed with the word até. And the progressive present is expressed periphrastically with the verb nemi which is also used as a general copula.

Below are some examples of phrases in Tabasco Nawat demonstrating most of these interesting features:

chinechtemoli in nokwach porkeh nimopatatiin

find me my clothes because I am going to change

niyah nitamatiin chinechtemoli notegun iwan se morral

I am going fishing find me my fishing rod and a morral

nehpa nemi one tagat yun nigittak yalla

there is the man I saw yesterday

one tagat yun wallahka yahkiya 

the man who came has already left

nigan nemi takwali yun mokwatiin 

here is the food that were going to eat

iwa:n one tagat yun yahkiya mokwepatiin 

the man who has left will come back

ka niga tigochitigiweh

where will we sleep?

Nigan gan tigochiskiah

this is where we were going to sleep

onehpa gan mottak one taagat

this is where we saw that man

nigan gan tigochkeh yallah

this is where we slept yesterday

yallah tichuugakkeh iwan ami nemilo welia

yesterday we cried, but today we are well

até tun kichin

he didnt do anything

tikpialo

we're taking care of it

iiyomexti nemi chuuga

the two of them are crying

geeski yahwan nemiya?

how many people were there?

How Cacao is Made

A Cacao pod rotting on the tree:
Fermin and many other Cacao producers
are plagued by pests, such as disease and squirrels.

Fermin Cruz Alvarez, produces cacao as do many people in Tabasco, and here is a small text in which he explains in Nawat how it is done. The recording can be heard here: gagawat.mp3

Bueno pues nah nechittago nin noknin nigan nugal, ge wallah pan dinamarca iiwan negi tahtani tunu tikmati pan noaltepet pal nologar. Iiwan pos ne ginegi ma nigili lo que gen motuga gagawat, gen mochowa producir, gen mowaatza, iiwan cuando nemi, genon mochowa.

Well, I, this friend has come to see me here in my house, he comes from Denmark and wants to ask what we know here in my community, in my place. And well he wants me to tell him how we plant cacao and how it is made to produce, and how it is dried and when it is there how we do with it.

Bueno pues gagawat cuando motuuga, primero motuuga kwawit, kwachipili wan tzopankilit iwan ya despues de ume o eyi xiwit cuando wefeya kwawit, motuuga gagawat, gagawat cuando peewa taagi de eyi xiwit nawi xiwit peewa xuchowi iwan ya despues giisa ixuchigagawat op unpewa giisa imasorka iwan opun peewa tagit ya despues gichowa itaagilo.

Well then, cacao, when it is planted, first the tree is planted, the kwachipili and tzopankilit, and then after two or three years when the tree grows, the cacao is planted. Then when the cacao begins giving fruit at three or four years it starts flowering and then afterwards the cacao bloom comes out, and the cob starts coming out and it begins to give fruit, and then it makes its fruit.

Bueno gagawat despues de seligagawat wehkaawa eyi meztli cuando wehweiya despues yoksi, despues de yoksi motegi, motegit gagawat cuando yoksika, despues motapana iiwan luego mowaatza, mowaatza pan toonatin, iiwan luego ya de wahki pos monaamaga.

Well, the cacao, then the tender cacao lasts three months and when it grows then it ripens, after it is ripe it is cut, the cacao is cut when it has ripened, then it is cracked open and then it dries, it dries in the sun, and then after it is dry, well it is sold.

Mowaatza an despues monaamaga, despues de monaamaga, despues gigoowa, tataxtawilia a veces. A wehka teemagaya miyak gagawat, ahorita ne ain tiempo ke nemi, nemi enfermedad pal [onemoliasis]. An ya despues giiski motohtzin

It is dried and then it is sold, after it is sold, they buy it, sometimes they pay it. Long ago it gave a lot of cacao, but now in these times that are here, there is disease [?]. And then afterwards the squirrel came out.

Motohtzin gigwa gagawat, gigwa seligagawat, despues yoksi entero […] produccion de gagawat porke tami gigwa, iiwan aparte de aparte de enfermedad tamik migi, iiwan gigwa motohtzin, yiga yo gagawat até nemi, ate teemaga: Ume plaga nemi de enfermedad pal gogolisti iiwan aparte pal motohtzin gitamiya.

The squirrel eats the cacao, it eats the tender cacao, after it ripens the production of cacao [is lost], because it finishes eating it. So apart it finishes dying from the disease, and then the squirrels ear it. Now the cacao isnt there, it doesnt give anything, there are two pests, the disease and then apart the squirrels finishes it off.  

Cacao: How a Single Word Holds the Key to Understanding the Mesoamerican Past

In this blog post I am going to summarize what is probably the most interesting example of how historical linguistics, in extreme this case the etymology of a single word, participates as evidence in the process of understanding ancient cultures.

A cup of hot Cacao with freshly made chocolate patties
on banana leaves in the back. Tlaquilpa, Veracruz 2014.

The word is question is cacao (or in English cocoa, a mangled version of the former with its own funny history), which describes the fruit of the tree Theobroma cacao, which in the form of chocolate  has provided a lot of deliciousness to people throughout the world.

The significance of this word is such that by determining its etymology, we have an important clue as to what language was spoken by the people who formed the first major civilization in Mesoamerica, the Olmecs.

Who created Mesoamerica?

Because the word has two different proposed etymologies, one that goes back to the deep past of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, and one that traces the word to the earliest Nahuan language, the word was become the lightning rod for the debates pitting the Nahuas and the Olmecs against each other as being the "founders of Mesoamerican civilization". 

Little chocolate figures in the shape of
 Olmec "colossal heads"

Specifically, one group of scholars argue that the Olmecs were a Mixe-Zoquean speaking people who cultivated maize, beans, squash and cacao and exported their knowledge and vocabulary to most of the other language groups in Mesoamerica. In this history the Nahuas originated in the U.S. Southwest and only entered Mesoamerica after the civilization had been established by speakers of Mixe-Zoquean, Otomanguean and Mayan languages. Another group of scholars argue that Uto-Aztecan speakers were among the original founders of the culture area, and that they were among the most politically and culturally important groups already in the formative era (starting about 2000 BCE, and becoming the Classic period around 200 CE), and that they might have been the main group behind the rise of the mega-empire of Teotihuacan (Teotihuacan collapsed around 600 CE). 

Cacao beans still in the pod.

The way civilizations have started in the world is generally through the development of new ways of making food that are easier and more efficient than older ones and which allow for population increase.  In Mesoamerica these innovations were the cultivation of maize from from wild species of grass, and the cultivation of squash and beans. This happened sometime between 3000 and 2000 BCE and led to people becoming sedentary, building villages and later towns with central governments. From around 2000 BCE the first major monuments and monumental architecture begins to be found in the gulf coast region of Mexico, and this culture with its distinct style of stone monuments is what archeologists call the Olmec culture. Its innovations and styles spread across Mesoamerica over the next period, being absorbed into local styles. This has led some archeologist to consider the Olmecs to be the "mother culture" of the Mesoamerican civilization, although others like to consider it only a "big sister" whose good ideas were accepted and used by the other siblings who had developed the main ingredients of civilization independently. 

So what does all this have to do with Cacao?

Cacao in Mesoamerica:

A maya ruler receiving his hot kakaw
 from a servant on a classic period vase.
Across Mesoamerica Cacao has
been associated with wealth and power,
even to the point of cacao beans being
used as a form of currency.

Just like maize, beans and squash, cacao is indigenous to Mesoamerica, and has been cultivated from wild species. But unlike these other species cacao is not a staple crop that provides nutrients necessary for basic survival, rather it is a luxury crop, that provides delicious theobromine for the nervous system at the expense of a laborious process of cultivation and processing. This means that the presence of cacao demonstrates that a culture has moved beyond the stage of bare necessities in generated a surplus. The generation of surplus in turn marks the beginning of class division and hierarchy, and a complex division of labor - the social signs archaeologists associate with the phenomenon we call "civilization". Therefore, signs of the consumption of cacao is a kind of litmus test for when and where Mesoamerican civilization can be said to have begun. 

Vessels tested positive for theobromine from San Lorenzo,
Powis, Cyphers et al. 2011.

As it is, we find the first signs of cacao cultivation and consumption among the Olmecs in the sites of El Manatí, and at San Lorenzo between  1800 and 1000 BCE. The signs are sure that it was cultivated for consumption because archeologists have found ceramic vessels with residue traces of theobromine, the active ingredient of cacao.
So the Olmecs were definitely into the chocolate rush. But what did they call this delicious addiction?

The word Cacao in Mesoamerica:

The Maya word kakaw spelled in
hieroglyphs as KA -KA-WA

The reason not only the fruit cacao is interesting but also the word is that almost all Mesoamerican languages have a very similar sounding word for it. This suggests that all these come from a single source. And if all Mesoamerican languages have their word for Cacao from a single source then it is logical to assume that they received the both word and the fruit it described from the same source as well. So basically it appears that the Olmecs exported both their ideas and their words to the rest of Mesoamerica. The trick then is to find out what language the Olmecs spoke - which is easier said than done since it is hard to determine which of the many languages that have similar words is the original one.

Note how similar the word for cacao is in different Mesoamerican languages (Source Kaufman & Justeson 2007):

• proto-Zoquean - *kakawa;  
• proto-Mixean - *kakaw;
• Nahua - /kakawa-tl/; 
• Mazahua - /kakawa/; 
• proto-Mayan, Totonac, Salvador Lenka - /kakaw/;
• Paya/pech - [kaku]; 
• Purhépecha: - /khe´kua/. 
• Boruka, Tol,-  and Honduras Lenka -  [kaw]

So where did the word originate?

The Mixe-Zoque hypothesis:

Cigar-smoking Maya
monkey-deity
holding a cacao pod.

In a hugely important 1976 paper Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman proposed that the Olmecs had spoken proto-Mixe-Zoque, the language that became the ancestor of the Zoquean and Mixean languages of southern Mexico. The argument was based on the observation that a number of important culture words could be demonstrated to have diffused  throughout Mesoamerica, and the evidence suggested that the diffusion was from Mixe-Zoquean languages into all the other ones. This was the paper that made the Mixe-Zoque languages, which had earlier been considered inconsequential and hardly even considered, a serious contender for the "Olmec question". Importantly, this argument doesn't hinge on the word for Cacao alone, because also words for other important cultivars such as gourds, squash, tomato and bean were traced to Mixe-Zoque along with several other important cultural concepts such as words related to maize preparation, to religion and to material culture. Previously many had considered it most likely that the Olmec spoke a Mayan language and that there was a direct continuity between Olmec and Maya cultures.


The Nahua hypothesis:

Tlapalcacauatl "red cacao"
from a colonial Nahuatl herbary.

In 2000 Karen Dakin and Søren Wichmann proposed specifically that the word Cacao did not originate with Mixe-Zoquean as proposed by Campbell and Kaufmann 24 years earlier, but that it had originated with a Uto-Aztecan language, probably Nahuan. They argued that if proto-Mixe-Zoquean had indeed had the word *kakawa, then most of the dauhgter languages would have irregularly derived forms of the original word. Rather they suggested the word had probably been borrowed by Mixe-Zoque speakers from some other language, leading to the irregularities they observed. They then looked at Uto-Aztecan language and found that many of them have a word for 'egg' that can be reconstructed as *kawa or *kapa. Nahuatl in fact is one of the only languages that do not have a word for 'egg' based on this stem (usually having either totoltetl "bird-stone", or tekwsistli originally meaning conch). They then argue that Nahuan kakawatl could be derived from an earlier Nahuatl word kawatl 'egg' (a word which is not actually attested) and that the reduplication of the -ka- could have originated from the process that makes nouns that are described as similar to what ever is being reduplicated. I.e. kakawatl could have originally meant "that which is similar to an egg". Cacao beans, although physically very different from eggs in color, size and shape, do have a thin shell that has to be removed after toasting, which can perhaps be considered similar to an eggshell. They took this argument to show that Nahuas had been present in Mesoamerica and played a major role already during the classic period, probably being associated with the empire of Teotihuacan, which they considered the source from which the Nahua word had spread to other languages including Mixe-Zoque and Maya. 

In 2001 Jane Hill proposed that contrary to received wisdom which considered the Uto-Aztecan languages to have originated in the U.S. Southwest with proto-Nahuatl speakers migrating southwards into Mesoamerica eventually taking up agriculture and many cultural traditions of the Mesoamericans, instead the opposite had happened. Hill argued that proto-Uto-Aztecan had been spoken in Mesoamerica and that its speakers had participated in develoiping Mesoamerican civilization whereafter a large group of Uto-Aztecans migrated northwards eventually giving up agriculture for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Her argument was that in her reconstruction of the language family's history, some maize related words could be recostructed all the way back to the Uto-Aztecan proto-language. 

In 2005 Martha Macri argued that three words in a very early Mayan glyphic text (from 480 AD) could be considered Nahuatl loans into Mayan, and that these words were all related to Cacao. The words in question were WITIK(I) which she related to Nahuatl /witeki/ "to beat something", MULUL which she related to Nahuatl /mo:lli/ "ground spice sauce" (sometimes containing Cacao), and KOXOM(A) which she related to Nahuatl /koxo:ni/ "for a hollow vessel to make a sloshing sound" or /koxo:nia/ "to stir a pot".  I must admit that personally, I find Macri's proposal completely unconvincing because none of the words have more than a speculative relation to cacao, they are not documented in any contemporary Mayan languages as loans, and because there is  not a good fit between the form of the proposed Nahuatl source and the given maya syllables, it seems unlikely that the words would be loaned in this form since they require loaning the verbs as stems and not as fully inflected verbs,  and finally because at least two of them actually have completely plausible Maya meanings and etymologies. I think Macri's proposal can be safely ignored, which most subsequent scholarship has also done. 

Nonetheless throughout the early 2000s there was a general sense that the tide was turning against the Mixe-Zoquean hypothesis and that probably Nahuas had been present in Mesoamerica earlier than was generally thought.  


Mixe-Zoquean strikes back:
But Terrence Kaufman would have none of it. He maintained vigorously that the Mixe-Zoquean hypothesis was solid. First in 1993 he and John Justeson had published an elaborate deciphering of the undeciphered Epi-Olmec (meaning late Olmec) or Isthmian hieroglyphic script arguing that it was written in the proto-Zoquean language. This would seem to be a serious piece of support for a Mixe-Zoquean-Olmec connection.  The decipherment was nonetheless contested by some Maya archeologists who were unable to read a third text using the proposed decipherment (Houston & Coe 2004). 

Doña Cristina, of Tlaquilpa, Veracruz,
 grinding Cacao with the toasted beans
in front and a calabash full of cinnamon.
The chocolate paste comes out of the grinde
and is mixed with sugar. 

In 2007 Justeson and Kaufman published a forceful rebuttal of Dakin and Wichmann's argument. They argued that the proposal of the Mixe-Zoquean as the donor language was solid both because in their reconstruction it fit well with the forms in the Mixe-Zoquean daughter languages and because it was supported by the fact words for many other cultigens could be demonstrated to have been most likely diffused from Mixe-Zoquean. (Wichmann actually agrees with Kaufman that the Olmecs spoke Zoquean and has provided evidence for that himself, so the disagreement for Wichmann seems to be mostly about the presence of Nahuas at Teotihuacan and the specific etymology of the word cacao). They also argued that the proposal deriving kakawatl from egg was untenable. They show that proto-Nahuatl had many borrowings from Mixe-Zoquean, and that even setting the word kakawatl aside all other loans from Nahuatl into Mesoamerican languages postdate the classic period. This seems to establish that there is a general pattern of Mixe-Zoquean influence on Nahuan dating to the classical period, but no general pattern of Nahuan influence on other languages in the classical period. They argue that if the Uto-Aztecan word 'egg' which they reconstruct as *kava had been derived regularly into Nahuan it would not have given /kakawatl/ but /*kaka:tl/ - the derivation proposed by Dakin and Wichmann, they consider to be impossible. Furthermore they show that when other Mesoamerican languages do borrow words from Nahuatl they do so with the absolutive suffix attached, i.e. the Nahua and Mixe-Zoquean forms should have been *kakawat and not /kakaw/. 

In 2009 Justeson and Kaufman published another intense counter argument, refuting in toto, Jane Hill's proposal of Uto-Aztecan originating in Mesoamerica (which had already attracted general dissaproval from Uto-Aztecanists), by showing that her Maize related reconstructions could only be dated to proto-Southern Utp-Aztecan, but not to the common ancestor of all Uto-Aztecan languages. Although Kaufman and Justeson did accept a slightly earlier date for the entry of Nahuas into Mesoamerica than they usually had (originally they considered Nahuas to have arrived around the time of the fall of Teotihuacan, but in 2009 ).  This, coupled with a wide set of other rebuttalls to Hill's theory, again shifted the balance to see Nahuas as latecomers in Mesoamerica, and Mixe-Zoquean speakers as the drivers of the Olmec "mother culture".

Further arguments were presented by Dakin in 2010 arguing for Nahua influence in the Mayan lowlands during the classic period. And in 2010 and 2012 Hill published again an argument to the effect that proto-Uto-Aztecan was a Mesoamerican language. Her maize related etymologies have meanwhile been rejected by scholars such as William Merrill (2012, Merrill et al. 2009), and Lyle Campbell (Campbell & Poser 2008). 

So what is the status? Confirmation Bias and its effects:

Too most ordinary people, including here most archeologists, historians and linguists, these debates simply look like a big pile of "my kung fu is stronger than your kung fu" - hard to make head or tails of.  This is because it requires intimate familiarity with both a vast number of languages, as well as the methods of historical linguistics, to judge which claims are better founded than others. 

I think that in the end, what will make most people side with one of the proposals is probably less about the soundness of the historical linguistics behind the proposals, and more about which story of the Mesoamerican past they prefer for their own personal reasons, whether aesthetics, preferences or experiences with one or more of the ethnic groups or scholars involved etc. 

Humans are funny that way. We are very quickly convinced by any evidence that points us in the direction we already want to go. 

Personally, I count myself on the Mixe-Zoque team for the time being. This may actually be because I know less about Mixe-Zoque than about Nahuatl and Uto-Aztecan, which means that I am more critical of the proposals involving Nahuatl, than of the ones involving languages I know less about. I have found the proposals of Dakin and Wichmann, Hill and Macri to be unconvincing in the ways they stretch meanings and forms to create what to me comes across as speculative etymologies. For example to get from *kava "egg" to *kakawatl "cacao" there are at least two leaps of faith, first the idea that they could be conceived as similar, and secondly the fact that the *kawa "egg" etymon is not attested in Nahuan at all - one such leap I might be willing to accept, but not two. Maybe Kaufman does the same kind of etymological twisting with Mixe-Zoquean, but I am unable to see it, and I am more convinced by his Nahuatl work.

My main point with this blog post is to demonstrate how historical linguistics is far from an exact science, but an interpretative science, where different scholars interpret the same facts differently based on their background knowledge.

And also to show how a single word for a fruit and a delicious beverage can become the key to such a highly political question as identifying the speakers of one language or another as the founders of the Mesoamerican civilization.

Bibliography:

• Campbell, L., & Kaufman, T. (1976). A linguistic look at the Olmecs. American Antiquity, 80-89.
• Campbell, L., & Poser, W. J. (2008). Language classification. History and method. Cambridge.
• Coe, S. D., Coe, M. D., & Huxtable, R. J. (1996). The true history of chocolate. London: Thames and Hudson.
• Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(01), 55-75.
• Dakin, K. (2010). Linguistic Evidence for Historical Contacts between Nahuas and Northern Lowland Mayan Speakers. Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests: Intellectual Interchange Between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period, 217.
• Hill, J. H. (2012). Proto-Uto-Aztecan as a Mesoamerican language. Ancient Mesoamerica, 23(01), 57-68.
• Hill, J. H. (2001). Proto‐Uto‐Aztecan: A Community of Cultivators in Central Mexico?. American Anthropologist, 103(4), 913-934.
• Houston, S. D., & Coe, M. D. (2003). Has Isthmian writing been deciphered.Mexicon, 25(6), 151-161.
• Joyce, R. A., & Henderson, J. S. (2010). Forming Mesoamerican Taste: Cacao Consumption in Formative Period Contexts. In Pre-Columbian Foodways (pp. 157-173). Springer New York.
• Justeson, J. S., & Kaufman, T. (1993). A decipherment of Epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing. Science, 259(5102), 1703-1711.
• Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2007). The history of the word for cacao in ancient Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica, 18(02), 193-237.
• Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2001, March). Epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing and texts. In The Proceedings of the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop: The Coming of Kings; Epi–Olmec Writing, March 10–11, 2001, University of Texas at Austin(pp. 93-224).
• Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2009). Historical linguistics and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica, 20(02), 221-231.
• Macri, M. J. (2005). Nahua Loan Words from the Early Classic Period: Words for cacao preparation on a Río Azul ceramic vessel. Ancient Mesoamerica,16(02), 321-326.
• Merrill, W. L. (2012). The historical linguistics of Uto-Aztecan agriculture.Anthropological Linguistics, 54(3), 203-260.
• Merrill, W. L., Hard, R. J., Mabry, J. B., Fritz, G. J., Adams, K. R., Roney, J. R., & MacWilliams, A. C. (2009). The diffusion of maize to the southwestern United States and its impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(50), 21019-21026.
• Powis, T. G., Cyphers, A., Gaikwad, N. W., Grivetti, L., & Cheong, K. (2011). Cacao use and the San Lorenzo Olmec. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(21), 8595-8600.
• Wichmann, S. (1995). The relationship among the Mixe-Zoquean languages of Mexico. University of Utah Press.

Nahuan Supremacy and the Aryans: On T. S. Denison's "The Primitive Aryans of America"

T. S. Denison (1848 - 1911)

In 1908 Thomas Stewart Denison (1848 - 1911) published a book titled "The Primitive Aryans of America" in which he purported to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the Nahuas of Mexico were not indigenous to the American continent, but that they were descendents of people from Central Asia who spoke a language of the Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. In order to do so he used the method of comparative philology which had been originally used to establish the relationship between European languages such as Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Greek to the Indian (or Aryan as they were then sometimes called, before the term Aryan got its Nazi connotations) languages such as Sanskrit, Pali and Hindi. The book can be read here.

As scholarship the book is worthless, for reasons I will describe below, but what is really interesting about it is the way that it fits into a particular racial and political ideology about Nahuas, Aztecs and the Nahuatl language. This particular ideology was prevalent in the late 19th century, and is still sometimes found among scholars and cultural activists: the ideology of Nahua supremacy.

Denison himself at no point appears to make political statements, nor does he explicitly push any ideologies about race, but once it is clear that the argument has no actual empirical basis,it becomes clear that the only explanation that someone would write a several hundred page work trying to tie the Aztecs to an Indo-European past must be a certain ideological necessity (even if it is implicit and subtle).

At best the data that Denison musters to support his argument can be understood as chance resemblances and at worst as (unconscious?) data manipulation. This kind of work is well known to all historical linguistics who all at some point have had to deal with crackpots positing exotic linguistic connections based on bad evidence. I think the problem is inherent in the comparative method, because it relies crucially on creative thinking seeing new patterns in the data, this process itself invites a particular kind of creative mind to the process. And since there also is not a very well established set of criteria for the rigor with which claims should be supported (there are some guidelines of course, but interpretations of them vary widely) it is almost inevitable that creative thinkers will be able to mold the method to get the appearance of rigor while in fact simply using a kind of  reasoning that proves nothing but something about their own subjective world of ideas and associations.

The most basic criteria for using the comparative method is that at least the forms and meanings used for comparison should actually exist in the languages compared. Denison falls short of this criterion almost throughout the book, using non-existent invented nahuatl words, or changing their meanings subtly or not so subtly to make it easier to establish connections to Indo-European words. For example when he wants to compare Nahuatl cualli "good" to Sanskrit काल्य (kālya "agreeable", "auspicious") and Greek καλός (kalos, "good", "attractive") he invents the additional meaning "fair" to take the Nahuatl word closer to the Greek meaning. The Nahuatl word is more likely to be related to the verb cua "to eat" and have been derived from a word meaning "something edible".  When the form doesn't match the word, he invents a hypothetical proto-Nahuan form that looks closer to the one in the Indo-European language and then uses that for the purpose of comparison. For example when he compares Nahuatl comitl "pot" to Sanskrit  कुम्भ (kumbha, a kind of pot), he invents a proto-Nahuatl form *kombitl, adding the b, to make the word look more similar. Historical linguists do invent reconstructed proto-forms to be used for comparison with higher level families, but for this not to be merely wishful thinking these have to be based on evidence from the lower level of the language for which the proto form is propose,d not from languages outside of it with which it is compared. For example if any Nahuan language had a form of the word for pot that had the extra b he posits, THEN he could have proposed it. But none do, so he cannot. It is beyond the scope of a blogpost to recount the many ways in which he abuses the data and the methods of historical linguistics throughout the book, but perhaps someday I will have the time to do so. Just for the fun of it. As a taste of what Denison works like I give the snapshot below of his table comparing Nahuan placenames in the mythical account of the migration from Aztlan to places in the Central Asia. 

In order to understand why a man would spend all this paper and energy on a project like this we have to look a little at the time in which he lived and what ideas were circulating then. Historical linguistics was not a new science, but it had not yet really been applied to Native American languages. Many were unsure if it were even possible. It was not until 1913 that Edward Sapir first established the relationship between Nahuatl and the Shoshonean languages of the U.S. using the method in a rigorous fashion. 

At the same time many scholars believed in polygenic theories of human evolution. The theory that humans had emerged separately on the different continents. This would assign the different "continental races" to the status of what was essentially different species. If this were the case then there was no reason to suspect that Native American languages were related to languages form the Old world. Indeed many believed that probably they weren't even languages in the same sense as European ones with grammar and rules of pronunciation and syntax. In this sense showing that a New World language was related to an Old World one would be quite an important feat. But this is not the main feat that Denison seems to have had in mind, because he considered Nahuatl to be unique among the Old World languages in that it was not at all indigenous. It was to him a language of Aryans that had crossed into the New World and forcefully submitted the local primitives to their will establishing an empire to rule over them.

In this way he drew on a long series of historical speculations about the relation between race and civilization. The most egregious example of such speculation is the French "count" Arthur de Gobineau (1816 - 1882). Gobineau was the first to use the word "Aryan" in a racial sense when he used it to describe what he believed was the supreme human race destined to destroy all other races with their superior might and intelligence, or else be destroyed by the envious petty masses of non-aryan underlings. Gobineaus main argument for Aryan superiority was that all civilizations had been created by Aryans, which he took to prove their innate superiority. To make that argument however he had to first find ways to describe all civilizations outside of Europe, including the Egyptians, Sumerians and Ancient Indian civilizations as somehow having been founded by "lost" Aryan tribes (whose wanderlust and entrepreneurial spirit was prone to take them on adventures in foreign lands).

Both Denison's use of the word Aryan, and his basic argument, namely that the Nahuatl language and the culture it represented were superior due to an European heritage, fits entirely into this pattern of white supremacist racial thinking, which could not conceive of indigenous cultures as being unable to make independent cultural achievements, and which saw history as an evolutionary process in which "less fit" cultures were gradually replaced by the more fit. 

In Mexico similar ideas thrived. Mexican linguist Francisco Pimentel (1832 - 1893) subscribed to the idea that some languages were innately superior than others, and that in a situation of contact the superior one would inevitably erase the inferior. For Pimentel this meant that of all Mexican languages Nahuatl, having imposed itself on other native peoples, was the superior, and also that in comparison to Spanish, Nahuatl was inferior and would have to eventually disappear. The same idea was common throughout the Mexican national establishment in the 19th century (this has also been described by Claudio Lomnitz). In his 1970 book Posdata, Octavio Paz refers to this view of Mexican history as "una pirámide trunca" (a truncated pyramid), where the Aztec civilization is seen as the platform on top of the pyramidal structure of Mesoamerican civilization, but a pyramid that still needs the peak, the summit, to reach fulfillment. Logically then in this view the Spanish conquest finally provides the conclusion of Mesoamerican history. Another metaphor that may work better today is that it is a kind of "World Cup" view of history where people face of on their local continents until a continental winner defeats everyone else on the continent and then they start playing between continental winners to find the final champion. Obviously the main group benefiting from this view would be the Spanish minded Mexicans who could put themselves in a situation of seeing their political ascendancy as natural and inevitable, and indigenous people crying for justice simply as sore losers. In this way inevitably the ideology of Aztec supremacy in Mesoamerica (through military might) leads to the corrollary of Spanish/European global supremacy. 

Unfortunately this view still exists in academia. In 2007, UNAM, Mexico's National Autonomous University published the book "El Primer Mestizaje" by the French archaeologist Christian Duverger. This book argues that contrary to the established consensus that the Nahuas were late comers to Mesoamerica, in fact they created Mesoamerican civilization by gradually conquering all the other peoples, erecting all the known monuments and being the prime movers of all known Mesoamerican societies where they dwelled as the sophisticated lords ruling over the dull and uncreative masses of Otomian, Zapotecan, Mixtecan, Totonacan, Mazahuan, and other non-Nahuan peoples. Duverger does not use the word "Aryan", but clearly his model is the same as the classical model from India that sees the lightskinned intelligent Aryans as conquering and ruling over the brown Dravidian masses whom they bring civilization. I will probably be writing more about Dugverger's book, its many many problems, and about some of its derivative works in the field of linguistics in later blogposts.