Colloquies Of The Twelve
I have quite the research treat for you tonight, dear reader! After quite some time patiently hunting and following threads (and guessing the correct URL behind a broken link when one last barrier tried to put an end to my quest), I successfully tracked down the only English, full-text translation of an important Conquest-era work… the Colloquios y doctrina christiania (“Dialogues and Christian Doctrine”), often known to English speakers by its nickname “The Colloquies of the Twelve.”
The bilingual Nahuatl/Spanish text dates to about 1564 and was penned by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. The work concerns itself with recording a series of debates between Mexican religious and political authorities and a team of twelve friars sent by the Spanish crown to attempt to destroy the indigenous faith. These verbal battles took place in the early 1520’s, shortly after the fall of the Aztec empire. While Sahagún didn’t reach Mexico until 1529 and thus was a few years too late to have witnessed these discussions himself, he did consult ten out of twelve of the friars, as well as four Mexica informants and four eminent native scholars (Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegeriano, Martin Jacobita, and Andres Leonardo), in order to reconstruct the debates (albeit in a highly-poetic and dramatic form).
The lone surviving manuscript was lost for over three hundred years until it was rediscovered in the Vatican archives in the early twentieth century. Sadly, of the thirty chapters, only fourteen have endured the ravages of time. It received a German translation by Zelia Nuttall in the 1940’s, but remained untranslated into English until 1978, thanks to the effort of Jorge Klor de Alva (the first complete modern Spanish translation was executed by Miguel Leon-Portilla in 1977). Its first and only publication was in the final issue of Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, Volume Four, Number Two, published by Boston University in 1980. This printing is the one I present you with today.
I also recommend poking around in other volumes in Alcheringa’s archives, as they have quite a bit of interesting stuff back there, including more Mesoamerican research and several recordings of indigenous poetry recitations. Thumbs up to Boston University for releasing these archives to the public, including the audio recordings that came with issues of this journal.
P.S. — As a bonus, this particular volume also includes several interesting Mayan legends I haven’t encountered anywhere else, and, related to my previous post, Thelma D. Sullivan’s full text translations of several birth/pregnancy huehuetlatolli speeches from Book 6 of the Florentine Codex.
*****
Book of the Colloquies; The Aztec-Spanish Dialogues of 1524. English edition translated and edited by Jorge Klor de Alva. Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics vol 4, no. 2:52—193. 1980.
Basic Nahuatl Pronunciation
As promised earlier, I’m doing a quick writeup of basic Nahuatl pronunciation and spelling. Or rather, I found a good one online that’s consistent with what the best modern dictionaries are using. The guide below is shamelessly ripped from the Wikibooks entry that houses it, and is extended with a few notes of mine. My thanks to the authors of this guide — Ptcamn, Icelandic Hurricane, and Jguk! Go HERE to view the original entry on Wikibooks. Or go HERE to have Wikibooks render a downloadable PDF of this guide (without my notes) for you.
UPDATE: … and it appears that the guys who set up the Wikibooks entry ripped it from David K. Jordan’s Nahuatl page, and extended it with their notes. The original is HERE, to give credit where it’s due.
Vowels
Nahuatl has four short vowels: a, e, i, and o. The vowels a, e and i sound similar to Spanish, while o can sound like either a Spanish o or a u. Unlike in English, where cuter and cutter have different vowels, the vowels of Nahuatl don’t change depending on what follows them.
Each vowel also has a long form, marked by a line or macron over the vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō. They have the same sound as the short vowels, but are simply held longer. [Cehualli’s note — these macrons are often omitted in actual texts]
Consonants
Nahuatl ch, m, n, p, t, and y are pronounced like English.
As in English, c represents an s-sound when followed by e or i, but a k-sound elsewhere.
Cu is pronounced kw, like in Spanish, or like English qu. Its inverse, uc, is the same sound at the end of a syllable.
Hu is pronounced like English w. Like cu, it is reversed at the end of a syllable, so auh sounds like ow, and iuh sounds like eww.
H alone, when not part of ch, hu or uh, may have represented a glottal stop, as in the Cockney pronunciation of bottle, or it may have been a sound like English h. Unlike English h, it is pronounced at the of syllables: ah isn’t simply a vowel, but a vowel followed by a consonant.
Before a vowel, l is the same as English or Spanish l. Before a consonant or at the end of a word, however, it is neither dark like English l in full, nor clear like Spanish l. It is a voiceless sound, like Welsh ll. This isn’t important to understanding, though, and it can be pronounced like an English l without introducing confusion.
Double ll is simply l, held longer. It isn’t a palatal sound like in Spanish, or a single l like in English.
Qu is used to represent the k-sound before e and i, like in Spanish. It isn’t pronounced “kw” as in English.
X is pronounced like English sh.
Tl is pronounced like t with the tongue held in a postion for l [Cehualli’s note — when this comes at the very end of a word, the l is very quiet, almost a whisper. Not pronounced “tul” as one might think!]
Tz is pronounced like German z, or like English ts except that the t is pronounced even at the start of words — not like tsar or tsunami, where the t is silent. [Cehualli’s note — like the ts in “kits,” in other words.]
Z is pronounced like English s.
Stress
Stress regularly falls on the second last syllable of a word.
Spelling
The spelling used here is a modern standardized system, in order to represent all the sounds of Nahuatl consistently. The spelling used in the original manuscripts did not always represent Nahuatl pronunciation accurately. In particular, vowel length and h were usually omitted. [Cehualli’s note — in a rare few manuscripts, like Carochi, you may see diacritics and other odd marks. Very rare, not something to worry about in general.]
Spelling & Pronunciation of Classical Nahuatl Words
Because the spelling of Nahuatl was originally based on spelling conventions in Spanish, Nahuatl texts are generally “pronounced like Spanish,” with the following exceptions and points to note:
- Words are stressed on the second-to-the-last vowel (excluding U) regardless of final consonants
- X is pronounced like English SH.
- LL is pronounced like a long L (not as in Spanish).
- TL counts as a single consonant, never as a full syllable.
- U does not occur as an independent vowel. The only Nahuatl vowels are A, E, I, and O, although each of them can be long or short.
- CU and UC are both pronounced KW.
- HU and UH are both pronounced W.
- H without an adjacent U represents a “silent” glottal stop (as in go_over); in modern Nahuatl it sometimes has a sound similar to an English H and may have had that value in some dialects of Classical Nahuatl as well. (For an English speaker, pronouncing the H like an English H is not really wrong and has the advantage that it helps one remember that it is there.)
- C before E or I is pronounced like English S. (The letter S is not used in Classical Nahuatl.)
- Z is pronounced like English S. (The letter S is not used in Classical Nahuatl.)
However over the centuries there has been considerable instability in the spelling of Nahuatl. Some common variations:
- The letters U and O may be used interchangeably to represent the sound of O.
- The letter U alone may be used instead of UH or HU to represent the sound of W.(At the time of the Conquest, the written letters V and U were usually reversed in Spanish from their modern values, so U indeed had the value of a modern English W.)
- The letter H representing the glottal stop may or may not be written.
- Vowel length may or may not be marked.
- The consonant Y may be written with the letter I.
- The vowel I may be written with the letter Y.
- The letter Ç may be used in place of Z to represent the sound of S.
In this century American linguists working with modern Nahuatl have sometimes preferred spellings that look less Spanish (and “coincidentally” more English). Thus:
- W may be used in place of HU or UH for the sound of W.
- K may be used in place of QU/C for the sound of K.
- S may be used in place of Z/C for the sound of S. [Cehualli’s note — Ç is also in this category.]
In some cases weird letters, available on no keyboard and included in very few type fonts, are used for TL, CH, CU/UC, and TZ to stress that these are single consonants, not compounds.*
New Nahuatl Language Links
I’ve added a new Links section over on the righthand side of the page, called Nahuatl Language. That section is where I’m linking material around the Net that relates to learning Nahuatl, particularly Classical Nahuatl (the language as it was a few hundred years ago). This stuff is always handy for reference, and to get your feet wet if you’re interested in learning how to read some of the primary sources that were written down in that tongue after the Conquest.
These links relate to reading Nahuatl written alphabetically, not reading the glyphs/pictographs that were used in the Codices prior to the Spanish invasion. I’m looking for material online that teaches a bit about the glyphs, though, and will link what I find.
Finally, the links in there now are in a mix of languages. Molina’s classic textbook and dictionary are antique Spanish and Nahuatl; I included them for those who can read old Spanish (not me!) and due to their foundational significance in the study of the language. The html version of Renee Simeon’s 1885 dictionary is Nahuatl to French, but I would expect the numerous free online translators could handle the short snippets of relatively-recent French without much trouble.
For my English-language audience, the Nahuatl Learning Environment is available in English (it’s also available in Spanish). Just log in with the ID and password noted in the link title (repeated in the tooltip if you hover your mouse cursor over it), and you’re good to go — there’s no registration or anything like that. Finally, the Freelang Nahuatl dictionary is a Nahuatl-English dictionary, and can be downloaded for offline use, or used via the web. Handy and free!
I’ll do a post sometime soon on basic pronunciation to go with all these links. I’ve seen the very formal charts on pronunciation that use the technical symbols and whatnot, but frankly I can’t read them, and I don’t know many who can. If you have a copy of Frances Kartunnen’s Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, I find her notes on pronunciation to be the most helpful I’ve come across.
Anyway, enjoy, and I’ll add more to this section as I find it.
Tlacatecco 