The News
Jan. 28, 2010
“Quen Tica?” María Rebeca González asked her students as they settled into plastic chairs in the empty, whitewashed classroom. “How are you?”
“Cenca cualli,” they responded. “Very well.”
González and her class of nearly 10 students are proof that Nahuatl, the language of Aztec rulers and ancient civilizations in Central Mexico, is still a living language. No longer resigned to collecting dust in museum galleries or archeological studios, the glyphs of Nahuatl are being summoned time after time by Mexicans to teach later generations about an often-misunderstood ancestry.
“When people begin to speak the language and read it, they begin to open a window towards our great past and all the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, and this strengthens us. You can see how our self-esteem grows,” González said from in front of a large dry-erase board, where Luis Miguel Chávez drew the daily glyph – one of 18 – assigned to that particular Thursday.
González offers classes in Nahuatl twice a week and year-round at the Casa de Cultura Azcapotzalco in Mexico City. For the past 10 years, she has taught its iconography, vocabulary, grammar and poetry to psychologists, mathematicians and language aficionados of nearly all ages. The class also puts on public presentations four times a year, celebrating dates such as the Mexica New Year on March 15 and Day of the Dead on Nov. 1, and also commemorating the rise and fall of Tenochtitlan, the Nahuatl name for the Aztec empire on which Mexico City was established.
“We’re trying to bring the community as close as we can to the truth. Our goal is not to exaggerate anything, but to always be citing our sources. Our objective is to learn the language so that it is not lost and to familiarize ourselves with the richness of the culture,” she said.
At each biweekly class, the teacher uses faded dictionaries in 16th-century Spanish, modern textbooks with glossy covers and black-and-white photocopies to walk students through a language that many unknowingly have already begun to speak.
“‘Xoxolatl’ and ‘chocolatl’ literally spell out ‘bitter water,’ but mean ‘chocolate,’” she said. She pointed out the slight variations between the Nahuatl and Spanish spellings for the Aztec cocoa drink that Spanish conquistadores sweetened into a rudimentary form of the chocolate we know today.
Mexico’s food vocabulary is replete with still more transformations. The tomato is a “xitotomate” or “xitomate” in Nahuatl and “jitomate” in regional Spanish. The thick cornmeal dough drink “atole” was first dubbed “atolli” in the indigenous language. The starchy, leaf-wrapped “tamalli” is now spelled “tamal” in Spanish.
Mexico City neighborhoods such as Xochimilco, Tlalpan, Tlatelolco, plus countless other districts in the State of Mexico like Naucalpan and Tultitlan, reflect a linguistic legacy dating back in Central Mexico to the 7th century.
Although many community workshops like González’s advertise classes in Nahuatl, the language is spoken in so many dialects that variations in more scattered and rural communities might sound completely different than the more uniform version taught in classrooms. Around 1.5 million people today speak Classic Nahuatl in the State of Mexico, the Federal District, Puebla, Hidalgo, Morelos, Guerrero, Michoacán, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Durango. The language is also being studied by native English speakers curious to understand the culture and by European residents whose heritage originated in the land of the Aztecs.
Originally spelled out in glyphs painted on stones and carved into impressive monoliths, the language has since adopted the Latin alphabet, lending itself to an incredibly ample library of poetry, codices, grammar guides and “huehuetlahtolli,” or formal discourses given at weddings, funerals and other proper events.
Alonso de Molina’s 1555 publication, “Vocabulary of the Castilian and Mexican Language,” was one of the first Spanish-Nahuatl dictionaries. Although the friar became literate in Nahuatl to spread the Catholic faith amongst Mexican communities, the book remains crucial to documenting Nahuatl in its written form. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and its Institute of Historical Investigation (IIH) have also played an essential role in documenting Nahuatl poetry in its Latin letters and in Spanish translations.
The revival in cataloguing and learning Nahuatl, however, is due in great part to Miguel León Portilla, an 84-year-old Mexican anthropologist and historian whose publications in the 1940s brought Nahuatl literature and poetry into the public eye. His book “Nahuatl Philosophy” explains how the Aztecs attempted to understand, question and inquire about the world.
In his poem “Cuando muere una lengua” (“When a Language Dies”), he writes, “When a language dies/ everything in the world/ oceans and rivers/ animals and plants/ neither think nor pronounce/ signs or sounds/ that no longer exist.”
Eduardo Lid Rico Domínguez said at a recent study session that, “It is very important to dispel the notion that speakers of Nahuatl, according to the Spanish, did not write. All of our lives, and even today in school, they tell us that ‘the Nahua people didn’t know how to read or write.’ Now is the time, with our teacher, that we understand that they did read, they did write, and how they did it.”
The student, who is also studying Italian at a university, added that when the Spaniards first came to Mexico, the colonizers interpreted indigenous glyphs as straightforward symbols. The national image of an eagle perched on a cactus and capturing a snake, for example, was not understood as a metaphorical concept uniting a nation and community, but rather as a nonsensical and literal translation.
“The language has a very important philosophical weight,” said Juana Sanchezcoviza D’Ramírez. “It is infinite what we can learn from Nahuatl. There are many insights into the conquest and indigenous points of view that have been lost.
“It is very important that we not forget our traditions, because every country has lineage in each of its roots; it is like a tree. We’re learning Nahuatl so that we don’t lose this, and so that in the future, younger generations can continue with these traditions, with this vast pool of knowledge,” she said.
Graciela Olvera Zépez added, “We are so absorbed in foreign things, and while the cultures of other countries are all beautiful, we are not looking at ourselves from within.”
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