Nahuatl (Modern Aztec)

Nahuatl (pronounced Náhuatl), meaning 'the pure language', is a language spoken by 1.5 million people in Mexico.

It is a descendant of the language spoken by the Aztecs, Toltecs and perhaps the people of the city of Teotihuacan and was the lingua franca of the Aztec empire in Mesoamerica from the 7th century AD until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. 

After the fall of the Aztec empire,various dialects of Nahuatl began to emerge. 

Today people who speak different Nahuatl dialects do not always understand each other.

Aztec Empire

The dialect of the Mexico Valley is closer to the classical Nahuatl of the Aztecs.

Classical Nahuatl was written using a pictographic system and was not a complete writing system but rather served the role of a mnemonic aid to enable the Aztecs to recite texts orally.

The Spaniards with their arrival introduced the Latin alphabet,when the systematic recording of works began.

 

With the arrival of the Spanish in Central America, Nahuatl lost its place as the dominant language of the region and many books were burned as they were considered pagan. 

However, the number of speakers of the language did not decrease but instead increased, which was due to the Spanish making alliances with Nahuatl-speaking tribes. 

Nahuatl speakers became key allies of the Spanish and served in the Spanish army by the thousands, resulting in the expansion of Nahuatl much further south into the Americas.

In fact Nahua soldiers made up the bulk of the Spanish forces that occupied the Philippines and even today Chavacano, a creole-based Spanish language spoken in the Philippines, has many Nahuatl words.

The language was later used by the Spaniards as a lingua franca and flourished with the production and translation of many books in Nahuatl, such as grammars, dictionaries and works of literature and poetry dating back to the 16th century AD, a unique phenomenon for an Indian language.

Many Nahuatl words passed into European languages mainly through Spanish; the words tomato, chocolate, tequila, chilli are Aztec Nahuatl words.

the alphabet 

A variant of the Latin alphabet introduced by the Spanish after the conquest of Mexico is used to write Nahuatl.

It consists of twenty-five letters:

a c ch cu e hu i l* m n o p qu t tl tz x y z ā ē ī ō ll* h*

Aztec pictograms

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The Aztec script

The Aztec Empire held sway of what is today Central Mexico.The Aztec people (a.k.a. the Mexica or the three tribes confederation) moving in from the north occupied and settled the area displacing previous populations. 

 The newcomers spoke Nahuatl and had no writing for their language upon arrival.In their new home they found several pictographic scipts related to each other used by many nations for hundreds of years already.

The Aztecs adopted a similar writing system to these but in a degraded form.It was used only for specific purposes such as calendars,marking important historic events and dates.Unlike neighbouring similar scripts like the Maya script it was never used for writing long text. 

They used numerous coroulful pictures for their writing system to record Nahuatl-the native name for the Aztec language.During the pre-Columbian era many manuscripts of various fields were produced in this script. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico (16nth century A.D) the traditional symbols and were eventually replaced by a Spanish-based alphabet. 

who invented it 

The Aztec god Quetzalkoatl was considered the inventor of writing.His name means ‘snake covered in green feathers’.He was one of the three main Aztec deities,creator of the world,humanity,culture,god of the morning star,master of nature,god of twins,agriculture and science.

Quetzakoatl was depicted as a bearded man in a mask,with disproportionaly big lips, wearing a jaguar hat and feathers of a Quetzal-the holy bird of the Atzetcs. This beautiful script of elaborate images-as well as other Aztec cultural achievements-were adopted from the Mayans in a degraded form. 

burning of books 

The Spanish after their arrival wasted no time in destroying the native culture and their writings of course.Thousands of Aztec books were burned as they were considered pagan works of evil.Nowadays only a handful of Aztec books survive in the old script.

These books are known as the Aztec codexes. Despite this mass destruction of Pre-colombian Aztec writings, manuscripts in the Aztec language did not stop being produced.But this time it had many notes in Spanish along with the drawings.These documents were produced by Spanish priests with the help of Aztec natives. There was a rich tradition of Aztec literature before the Spanish arrival which continued and flourished well after. 

some features of Atzec writing 

The Aztec alphabet is basically a pictographic system with hieroglyphic elements and up until recently Aztec writing was not considered a fully developed writing system. But, recent advances on the matter showed it was much more advanced than previously thought-many syllabic and even phonetic (they mark a single sound) drawings have been identified in the script which were used in along with the pictographs. The symbols where not used systematically and there was no fixed direction to write them. Names were written in a way based on the Rebus principle-words were formed by putting together various images which stood for individual parts of the word.

Rebus principle- name of ruler Itzcoatl

The –tl suffix -found in so many Aztec words- is an article and was usually not recorded by any symbol. A number of symbols where gradually standardized and were used to write only prefixes and suffixes.Certain symbols have been identified as phonetic changing the previous view we had about the script as being exclusively logographic with some syllabographic features. Hieroglyphic characters were used mainly for numbers, in calendars and to note some specific or abstract meanings like moon,sun,sky,death,life,etc. The prefered material for writing was refined leather or bark paper folded like an accordion for keeping. 

  Signs for the Aztec calendar 

There were 20 characters used for the Aztec calendar.Each sign marked a day of the twenty-day month in the calendar.

Some of the Aztec day signs

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