Eastern and Western Nahuatl Dialects

As noted in previous blogs, I am working on analyzing and understanding Nahuan dialectology, dialectology of course being the study of patterns of regional variation.

The way this works is that one looks at the linguistic traits that vary between how Nahuatl is spoken in different regions, and then classify the dialect of each region into the varieties that they are most similar to. Classification can be based simply on superficial similarity, grouping everything similar together, or it can be based on historical development, where you classify dialects together that seem to share a single origin because they display shared innovations.

Another way is to classify by region. Here the tricky part is that the number of possible regions is almost infinite. One could potentially classify each of the many thousand local communities where the 1,5 million Nahuatl speakers live each as a separate dialect. Because every local community has certain ways of speaking that set them off from their neighbors. Dialect areas then are areas regions where certain traits a more frequent than in other regions, with the caveat that not every dialect in the area necessarily has all of the features characteristic of the area were it is spoken, and some dialects in other regions may have them too.

In the literature on Nahuatl dialectology the basic division is both regional and historical. It divides all the Nahuan languages into two basic groups: The Eastern and the Western dialects. This grouping was first proposed by Una Canger and Karen Dakin in 1985. They had realized that some dialects systematically had the vowel /i/ in certain words where other dialects had /e/. They also noted that all of the words where this correspondence was found corresponded to words that had oeiginally had the vowel *u in Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA).  The words they focused on were tesi/tisi "to grind" (from PUA *tusu), sentli/sintli "corn" (from PUA *sunu), iste/isti "fingernail" (from PUA *sutu) and ihte/ihti "stomach" (which Daking and Canger reconstruct as coming from PUA *patu, I am personally a little dubious of this form). The i forms were generally found in the dialects in the extreme eastern range of the area where Nahuatl is spoken, and the e forms were generally found in the western extreme.

Later Dakin (2000) and Canger (1988) each added some new traits to each of the two areas. Canger noted that in the Western area, the prefix o- is used to mark the past tense, and in the Eastern area it is absent, and that Eastern dialects tend to put the adverb ok after the predicate it modifies whereas in the West it precedes it. Dakin noted that the Western dialects tend to have ye- in a number of forms where the Eastern dialects have e- (e.g. yetl/etl (bean), yestli/estli (blood), yeyi/eyi (three) and yepatl/epatl "skunk"). Dakin saw that each of these words originally began with *p in PUA, and she surmised that the *p had changed into /y/ in the West but had disappeared entirely in the East.

In a recent paper of my own I argue that the two dialect areas also differ in the way that they negate sentences. Western dialects all use the adverb ahmo or ammo as the negator in all sentences. But in Eastern Nahuatl other words are used, either instead of ahmo or in addition to ammo. For example in the Huasteca region the negator is the prefix ax-, in the Puebla Highlands it is kanah, in Guerrero it is ka, and in the isthmus it is aya', ate, the prefix ah- or in Tabasco the word até and in El Salvador nite, inte ot tesu. In many Eastern varieties there are more than one negator and the use depends on the mood of the clause, one may be used for imperatives, subjunctives and conditionals and another for realis/indicative sentences for example.

The map below shows the locations of Eastern (red) and Western (blue) dialects. It also includes the extinct Pochutec language which seems to have split from proto-Nahuan before the split between Eastern and Western varieties. I have colored the varieties of Central Guerrero purple, that is because they seem to me to be conservative sharing few of the innovations of the other areas, and possibly have split also very early perhaps before the East-West split. (Note also that the varieties in Chiapas went extinct in the early 20th century, and that there are very few speakers in Jalisco).

"Classical" and Central Nahuatl are mixed dialects!

So what about "Classical Nahuatl". Well first of all I don't think that is a very good name for the colonial Nahuatl that we know from so many sources. I think it is better to call it colonial Nahuatl. The best known variety of colonial Nahuatl is the one from Mexico City, based on the dialect of Tetzcoco. Canger (2011) has argued very convincingly that this dialect which she calls Urban Nauatl, was a mixture of Eastern and Western varieties, that arose as people form different dialect areas mingled in the great city of Tenochtitlan.

Definitely many of the Central varieties seem to have traits from both Eastern and Wstern branches, and it is sometimes difficult to classify them. This is probably because the Eastern varieties must have been in the area longest and Western dialects then arrived later imposing their prestige language on the earlier speakers of Eastern Nahuatl. This would mean that many of the Central dialects (e.g. in Puebla, Morelos, Zongolica) are Western dialects with an Eastern substrate.

Works cited:

*Canger, Una. 1988. “Nahuatl Dialectology: A Survey and Some Suggestions” International Journal of American Linguistics 54:28-73.
*Canger, Una. 1988b [1978]. Subgrupos de los dialectos Nahuas. In Smoke and Mist, Mesoamerican Studies in memory of Thelma Sullivan. Kathryn Josserand & Karen Dakin (eds.) B.A.R. International Series 402.
*Canger, Una. 2011. "El nauatl urbano de Tlatelolco/Tenochtitlan, resultado de convergencia entredialectos, con un esbozo brevísimo de la historia de los dialectos". Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl (Mexico: UNAM): 243–258.
*Canger, Una and Karen Dakin. 1985. An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl. International Journal of American Linguistics 51: 358–361.
*Dakin, Karen. 2000. Proto-Uto-Aztecan *p and the e/ye isogloss in Nahuatl Dialectology. In UtoAztecan: Structural, Temporal, and Geographic Perspectives. Eugene Casad & Thomas Willett (eds.) Hermosillo, Mexico: University of Sonora. pp. 213-19

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.  

Studying the Nahuan family with Methods of Molecular Biology

In this blog post I will give a sneak-peek on some ongoing work that I am doing which involves learning the techniques biologists use to build family trees (called phylogenies) for species or other groups of organisms and applying those techniques to understanding the relations between Nahuan dialects.

As we know, languages form "families", which basically means that a group of languages can trace their lineages back to a shared ancestor. Language families appear because most languages split into daughter languages each of which diverge from the parent in a different way. This process is what we can observe when we look at dialects of a single language. Each dialect is a variety of the language that is in the process of breaking away from the parent language and form its own language. Divergence like this happens because all languages innovate, by introducing new ways of speaking, that didn't exist in the parent language.

The same is of course what happens in biological organisms where new mutations accumulate and spread in the DNA of a population causing daughter populations to diverge from the parent population. Biologists working with molecular data analyze how these mutations can be compared and traced so that we can reconstruct the genealogy of an entire family of related organisms by grouping those organisms that share specific mutations together.

Because of each new way of speaking that arises and spreads in a community can be compared to a mutation in the DNA that spreads in a population, we can use the same methods that biologists use to trace biological phylogenies to understanding the divergence of dialects.

Nahuan Dialects:

I am in the process of understanding how all the different regional varieties (dialects) of Nahuatl are related to each other. This would help us understand where the Nahuan parent language (called proto-Nahua by linguists) originated and how it spread. In order to do this I have to find out what the shared innovations that characterize each dialect area are, and then trace them back to build a family tree. I am well underways with this project, and I presented a preliminary version of this at the Meeting of the Friends of Uto-Aztecan in Nayarit this summer (Here is a link to the paper).

But what I am doing now is mapping this information into the same kind of model that biologists use, in order to apply statistical methods to better understand the relations. Doing this allows me to generate nice graphic trees using a program called Mesquite, and this is what I want to let you peek at. 

Here is an example of how each dialect (identified with a three letter code)
is plotted into a matrix of shared innovations.
These are only some of the characters I am using.

The data is entered in binary form: each innovation present in a dialect is entered as a 1, and the lack of a specific innovation is entered as a zero (i.e. when the original form is retained). Each position of 1/0 is called "a character". By listing all the characters that I am tracking, each dialect is identified with a string of ones and zeros (called a Markov chain). And by analyzing all the characters together a phylogeny is formed. For example the dialect area of Morelos is identified with the string: 011110101 - 100000100001 – 1000000000 Where each 1 is an innovation the dialects in Morelos have, and each 0 an innovation they don't have. 

I am working with 22 distinct dialects, most of them are regional, though a few are limited to only a single community. The communities and the codes I use to identify them are: Durango/Mexicanero (DUR). Michoacan (around Pomaro) (MCH), Mexico State (around Toluca) (MEX), North Guerrero (around Coatepec Costales), Federal District (mainly Texcoco)  (DFE), North Puebla (around Huauhchinango) (NPU), Morelos (MOR), Tetelcingo, Morelos (TET), SOuth Puebla (around Tehuacan) (SPU), Zongolica, Veracruz (ZON), Tlaxcala (TLX), Western Huasteca (Hidalgo/San Luis), Eastern Huasteca (Hidalgo/Veracruz), Sierra de Puebla (SDP), Isthmus (Area north of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz) (IST),  Pajapan, Veracruz (Town in the Isthmus area), Tabasco Nawat (TAB), Chiapas Nahuat (extinct) (CHS), Pipil Nawat of El Salvador (PIP), Central Guerrero Nahuatl (GRO), Oapan (a town in Central Guerrero) and Southern Guerrero Nahuatl (CGR). Each of these have been assigned a specific binary chain, although I still need to double check some of them in the literature to be sure I am assigning the right values, and perhaps adding more characters to the chains.

The preliminary result of my analysis is a tree that looks like this, which is interesting because it has a much more treelike branching structure than most of the previous classifications. Otherwise it does not diverge in major ways from the recent classifications by Canger (1988) or Kaufman (2001). That is partly because I have used their analyses to identify the innovations that have relevance for classification.

The bushiness comes from the fact that I have been able to identify chains of innovations in the eastern branch, where particularly the development of the negation provides a signal that I believ can can be traced along several steps. Previous classifications have been shallow bushes because they have not to the same extent tried to trace independent innovations in different areas. Canger and Dakin introduced the basic split between eastern and western branches, based on a single innovation. I have been able to add a few further innovations to the basic split. But this is about the only deep isogloss in the standard classification - the rest of it is basically a synchronic classification of the distinct areas assigning them to one or the other of the two branches. By looking at the relations between the areas within the two branches I have been able to get a bushier tree.

The tree has two main branches an Eastern and a Western branch. The Western branch is divided into a Periphery (including the dialects of Durango, Michoacan, Mexico state and North Guerrero), and a Center (including the dialects of the D.F. Morelos, North Puebla, South Puebla, Zongolica and Tlaxcala). The Eastern branch is divided into the Eastern Periphery (including the dialects of the Huasteca, the Isthmus, and Central America), and Guerrero (Central and South). The Eastern periphery is subdivided into a Huastecan and an Isthmian branch, with the Sierra de Puebla dialects in a kind of intermediate position between the two.

The next step after double and triple checking the data for the tree is to map each dialect to its geographical correlates and use a phylogeographic mapping program to calculate the probable paths that each community took to arrive to their current locations.

Meanwhile, here is the pretty tree for you to take a look at:

Chicolatl not *xocolatl!

Following my last blogpost about the etymology of cacao I got some requests to also write about the etymology of the word Chocolate which like cacao also entered the English language through Spanish and Nahuatl. In this case everyone agrees that the word originates in Nahuatl, but nonetheless there is also a bit of controversy here. Specifically the question is how to analyze its original components and meaning. And as it turns out there is also controversy about the phonological form of the original word. So it gives me another chance to dispel a common misconception about a Nahuatl etymology, which is a chance I can not let go past.

The "Xocolatl" Etymology.

All over the internet and in a lot of published works we will find the claim that the original Nahuatl word was "xocolatl" /xokola:tl/ and that it had the meaning "bitter water". For example here in the Online Etymological Dictionary:

"Chocolate: c.1600, from Nahuatl (Aztecan) xocolatl, possibly from xocolia "to make bitter" + atl "water." Brought to Spain by 1520, from thence to the rest of Europe. Originally a drink; as a paste or cake made of ground, roasted, sweetened cacao seeds, 1640s."

This etymology is repeated so widely that it is even the name of a relatively well known artisanal chocolate company, with a store on Manhattan's Fifth avenue and a large sign that says XOCOLATL.

Well, maybe after they read this blogpost they will want to change that sign, because that is probably not actually what the Aztecs called the chocolate beverage that they liked to drink.

Ki? WTF? 

There are a number of problems with the "xocolatl" etymology:

1. The word xocolatl does not seem to be actually attested anywhere. Alonso de Molina has "xocoatl - cierta beuida de mayz" (a certain drink made of corn), but there is little reason to think that this drink included cacao. Probably it was water with corn dough turned sour through fermentation. This drink is still prepared by Nahuas in Mexico who sometimes call it xocoatolli, "sour Atole" (found in the RAE as xocoatole). It is and was used for medicinal purposes.
2. What is attested is a word chocolatl with ch, which is found to day in most Nahuan varieties. For example in Salvadoran Pipil as /chukulat/, in Hueyapan Nahuatl and in Zongolica as /chokolatl/ and in Xoxocotla Morelos as /chikolatl/ (note that here is an /i/ in the first syllable). 
3. The word xococ does not mean "bitter" (that would be chichik) but rather "sour". And unsweetened chocolate is not sour.
4. The verb xocoya "to become sour" and the adjective xococ "sour" does not fit the form xocol with a final -l- that is in xocoLatl, and it is difficult to find a way that it could be converted into xocol-. Karttunen suggests it could be through the verb xocolia the applicative of xocoya with the meaning "to make something sour". But it is hard to see how this could be compounded with atl and keep the l. That cannot be done through normal derivational processes. 

So basically xocolatl is a very weakly supported etymology and it is difficult to know exactly where it comes from. It seems that its popularity may have originated with Frances Karttunen's Analytical Dictionary, although she only suggests it tentatively as a possibility when under the entry chocolātl she writes:

 "Possibly the initial element is related to M[olina]'s xocolia "to make something bitter or sour"and to xococ "something sour". The substitution of CH for X is not uncommon." 

So basically it seems that Karttunen suggested it as a tentative possibility and it was taken up by others as if it were a fact. As noted above I am skeptical of the xocolia connection. I also don't think substitution of /ch/ for /x/ is that common, I certainly can't think of any and neither can Dakin and Wichmann when they write of an earlier publication of the same argument by Robel 1904 which they don't include in their bibliography and I haven't been able to track down. They write: "Underlying this suggestion is the argument that the original drink was not sweet. Even so, this etymology is unlikely since /č/ does not change to /š/ in any other term in Nahuatl." (Dakin & Wichmann 2000:61).

Noooo......

So probably it makes sense to look around for a different etymology.

The "Chikolatl" Etymology

It just so happens that in their article on the word cacao Dakin and Wichmann (2000) also gave a treatment of the etymology of chocolate. They argue against the xocolatl etymology and state that more likely the original form of the word is chikolatl with an /i/. This they base on the fact that

1. chikolatl  is attested in a number of Nahuatl varieties (Morelos (Ocotepec, Xoxocotla), Ameyaltepec, Gro, Cuetzalan Pue, Rafael Delgado, Ver, North Puebla) 
2. Some dialects have a tendency to change /i/ to /o/ in initial syllables if there is an /o/ in the second syllable. Wichmann and Dakin say this most common in Western dialects but I don't really see that - and neither Ameyaltepec, Xoxocotla/Ocotepec or Rafael Delgado are particularly Eastern varieties in my opinion. 
3. chikolatl seems to have been borrowed with i into a number of other Mesoamerican languages (including varieties of Mixtec and Zapotec and several Mixe-Zoquean languages)
4. In Nahuatl there is an instrument called a chi(h)kolli  which is a stick with a hook end. This they argue can be considered similar to the cacao beaters used to make chocolate beverages frothy and foamy in many Mesoamerican cultures. 
5. The origin of the word would then be chikolatl "water made with a chikol-stick".

But what does Kaufman and Justeson (2007) have to say then?

Given how critical they were of Dakin and Wichmann's article we might expect them to have rejected this proposal as well. But, no. They actually agree that the original form was chikolatl, all though they are unconvinced by the chihkol stick etymology, and contest some of the supposed supporting evidence for diffusion into other languages, and particularly the idea that it is an ancient word diffused into other Mesoamerican languages at an early time.

Kaufman and Justeson actually makes a good argument in favor of seeing /chikolatl/ as the most likely original form. This is because in Nahuatl the sound /ch/ tends to come from a palatalization of /ts/ or /t/ before /i/. So in all cases where we have a /ch/ in Nahuatl, we expect it to have been originally preceding the vowel /i/, even when that vowel is no longer there because it has turned into some other vowel.

The conclusion: We don't know what it meant, but it wasn't "bitter water".

Nonetheless Kaufman, Justeson, Wichmann and Dakin - some of the brightest minds in Mesoamerican historical linguistics actually agree that the word does not come from xocolatl. And these people are not in the habit of agreeing on anything, so let's not cause further problems by second-guessing them here.

The word chocolate comes from the Nahuatl word /chikola:tl/ which meant "chocolate beverage". 

Paraphrasing Martin Luther, that is what we know, and everything beyond that is speculative etymology and belongs to the devil in hell.

No! You're doing it wrong!

Bibliography:

• Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(01), 55-75.
• Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2007). The history of the word for cacao in ancient Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica, 18(02), 193-237.

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.