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A colourful language

A colourful language

Nezahualcoyotl poem with flowers

Colours in Náhuatl: a list compiled by Susana Moraleda, showing the wide range of words in Náhuatl used to describe shades of colours. Many thanks, Susana, for allowing us to upload this resource to our website!

Sources:-
• Karttunen, Frances – An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl – University of Texas Press, 1992
• Molina, Fray Alonso – Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana y Mexicana y Castellana – Editorial Porrúa, Mexico 1992
• Siméon, Rémi – Diccionario de la Lengua Nahuatl o Mexicana – Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico, 1992

With thanks to Michael McCafferty for providing additional terms from the Florentine Codex.

Graphic presentation by Debs Tyler.
Photo (top, with two lines of poem by Nezahualcoyotl), by and thanks to Scott Hadley.

Susana Moraleda’s website

Comments (2)

R

Russell Shields

29th Jun 2019

I read somewhere that literate Aztecs, seeing European writing in simple black ink, deemed it a poor writing method as li lacked color, and therefore omitted much emotional content that went with the color given to any particular Aztec glyph. True?

M

Mexicolore

Highly likely! But we haven’t come across this idea ourselves. We’ll certainly keep an eye open for it... Thanks for sharing.

t

tecpaocelotl

30th Apr 2010

That’s more colors than I knew.

Thanks for sharing.

A colourful language

Nezahualcoyotl poem with flowers

More Aztec Language