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| Classical Nahuatl | |
|---|---|
| Nāhuatlāhtōlli | |
| Pronunciation | [naːwat͡ɬaʔˈtoːlːi] |
| Native to | Mexico |
| Region | Aztec Empire. PostclassicMesoamerica |
| Era | 14th to 16th century, during theLate Postclassic and afterConquest of Mexico in theEarly Colonial Period |
Uto-Aztecan languages
| |
Standard forms |
Colonial Nahuatl |
| Mixteca-Puebla Hieroglyphs (Aztec Script)/Latin Alphabet (Nahuatl Alphabet) | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | nci |
| Glottolog | clas1250 |
| This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. | |
Classical Nahuatl, also known simply asAztec orCodical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in theMesoamerican Codices through the medium ofAztec Hieroglyphs) andColonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in theLatin Alphabet), is a set of variants ofNahuatl spoken in theValley of Mexico and central Mexico as alingua franca at the time of the 16th-centurySpanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced bySpanish and evolved into some of the modernNahuan languages in use (other modern dialects descend more directly from other 16th-century variants). Although classified as anextinct language,[1] Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed byNahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
Classical Nahuatl is one of theNahuan languages within theUto-Aztecan family. It is classified as a central dialect and is most closely related to the modern dialects of Nahuatl spoken in the valley of Mexico in colonial and modern times. It is probable that the Classical Nahuatl documented by 16th- and 17th-century written sources represents a particularly prestigioussociolect. That is to say, the variety of Nahuatl recorded in these documents is most likely to be more particularly representative of the speech of Aztec nobles (pīpiltin), while the commoners (mācēhualtin) spoke a somewhat different variety.
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i,iː | o,oː |
| Mid | e,eː | |
| Open | a,aː | |
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | lateral | plain | labial | ||||
| Plosive | p | t | k | kʷ | ʔ | ||
| Affricate | ts | tɬ | tʃ | ||||
| Fricative | s | ʃ | |||||
| Sonorant | m | n | l | j | w | ||
Stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable. The one exception is thevocative suffix (used by men)-é, which is added to the end of a word and is always stressed, e.g.Cuāuhtliquetzqui (a name, meaning "Eagle Warrior"), butCuāuhtliquetzqué "O Cuauhtliquetzqui!"
When women use the vocative, the stress is shifted to the final syllable without adding any suffix.Oquichtli means "man", andoquichtlí means "O man!"
Maximally complex Nahuatl syllables are of the form CVC;[2]that is, there can be at most one consonant at the beginning and end of every syllable. In contrast,English, for example, allows up to three consonants syllable-initially and up to fourconsonants to occur at the end of syllables (e.g.strengths) (ngths =/ŋkθs/).[3]Consonant clusters are only allowed word-medially, Nahuatl uses processes of both epenthesis (usually of/i/) and deletion to deal with this constraint.
For such purposes,tl/tɬ/, like all other affricates, is treated as a single sound, and not all consonants can occur in both syllable-initial and syllable-final position.
The sonorants /n/,/l/ and/w/ aredevoiced in syllable-final position. Likewise,/j/ is also devoiced and merged into/ʃ/ in syllable-final position.[4] The sonorant /m/ is the only one that is not devoiced in final position because it never appears in that position to begin with.[5]
At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostlypictograms supplemented with a fewideograms. When needed, it also used syllabic equivalences[citation needed];Diego Durán recorded how thetlacuilos could render a prayer inLatin using this system but it was difficult to use. The writing system was adequate for keeping such records as genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists, but it could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language in the way that thewriting systems of theOld World or theMaya civilization'sscript could.
The Spanish introduced theLatin script, which was then used to record a large body of Aztec prose and poetry, which somewhat diminished the devastating loss caused by the burning of thousands ofAztec codices by the Spanish authorities.
| Phoneme | IPA | Romanisation scheme | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michel Launey[6] | ||||||||
| a | [a] | a | ||||||
| e | [e] | e | ||||||
| i | [i] | i | ||||||
| o | [o] | o | ||||||
| u | [u] | o | ||||||
| a | [aː] | ā | ||||||
| e | [eː] | ē | ||||||
| i | [iː] | ī | ||||||
| o | [oː] | ō | ||||||
| u | [uː] | ō | ||||||
| p | [p] | p | ||||||
| t | [t] | t | ||||||
| k | [k] | qu (before i and e) c (in all other cases) | ||||||
| c | [ts] | tz | ||||||
| č | [tʃ] | ch | ||||||
| λ | [tɬ] | tl | ||||||
| kw | [kʷ] | cu (before vowels) uc (in all other cases) | ||||||
| m | [m] | m | ||||||
| n | [n] | n | ||||||
| s | [s] | c (before e and i) z (in all other cases) | ||||||
| š | [ʃ] | x | ||||||
| y | [j] | y | ||||||
| w | [w] | hu (before vowels) uh (in all other cases) | ||||||
| l | [l] | l | ||||||
| ll | [lː] | ll | ||||||
| ʼ | [ʔ] | ◌̀ (on the preceding vowel within word) ◌̂ (on the preceding vowel at the end of a word) | ||||||
| ʼ | [h] | ◌̀ (on the preceding vowel within word) ◌̂ (on the preceding vowel at the end of a word) | ||||||
Nahuatl literature is extensive (probably the most extensive of all Indigenous languages of the Americas), including a relatively large corpus ofpoetry (see alsoNezahualcoyotl). TheHuei tlamahuiçoltica is an early sample of literary Nahuatl.
Abilingual dictionary with Spanish,Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana, was first published in 1611 and is "the most important and most frequently reprinted Spanish work on Nahuatl," according to theWorld Digital Library.[7][dead link]
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Media related toClassical Nahuatl language at Wikimedia Commons