First Steps in Nahuatl

This was conventional greeting, although there would have been few whom the tlatoani of all Mexico would address as teukyoe “Lordship”.
O tlaltitec tommahzitiko, o iten tommopaciwiltiko in matzin in motepetzin, Mešihko, o ipan tommowetziko in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, in o acitzinka nimitzonnopiyalilih, in onimitzonnotlapiyalilih...
“You have graciously come on earth, you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.”
The language was, of course, completely unintelligible to Cortés, but he was fortunate to be given a running interpretation, by courtesy of a couple of bilinguals who worked in tandem.

Pic 2: Motecuhzoma and Cortés converse, through an interpreter... Illustration by Keith Henderson

Cortés’s interpreters were Gerónimo de Aguilar, a Spanish friar, and Doña Marina, originally Malinalli Tenepal, a young woman who spoke Nahuatl natively. Gerónimo had suffered shipwreck on the coast of Yucatan, and spent 8 years in captivity with Mayans: he therefore knew Spanish and one dialect of Mayan. Doña Marina, known in Nahuatl as Malin-tzin (with an honorific suffix), had grown up speaking both Nahuatl and another Mayan dialect. She had acquired her Nahuatl in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 km south of the border of the Aztec empire. But later in childhood, she had been traded to Xicalango, close by, but in a Mayan-language area. She had subsequently been among 20 slaves given to the Spanish victors by natives of Tabasco after losing the battle of Centla in 1519.
It was possible therefore for Malin-tzin and and Gerónimo working together (pic 4) to mediate between Nahuatl and Spanish, with some kind of Mayan as interlingua. Later, Malin-tzin was able to learn Spanish herself. She continued as interpreter (and some say, counsellor) to Cortés for some years thereafter. She may have been the first bilingual in Spanish and Nahuatl, and ca 1522 she became the mother of Cortés’s son Martín, one of the very first Spanish-Nahuatl mestizo children.

Pic 4: Cortés meets three Aztec ambassadors; Gerónimo de Aguilar and Doña Marina interpret for him. Illustration by Keith Henderson

We shall never know, and this in itself is a humbling lesson in the perplexity that may stem from linguistic diversity. At any rate, Cortés – while implicitly accepting the offer – kept up the show of apparent diplomatic courtesy, as an eyewitness, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recounted:-
’Cortés replied through our interpreters (lenguas “tongues”), who were always with him, especially Doña Marina (Malin-tzin), and told him that he did not know with what to repay him, neither himself or any of us, for all the great favours received every day, and that certainly we came from where the sun rises, and we are vassals and servants of a great lord called the great emperor Don Carlos, who has subject to him many great princes, and that having news of Motecuhzoma and of what a great lord he is, he sent us here to see him and ask him that they should be Christians, as is our emperor and are we all, and that he and all his vassals would save their souls.’

Pic 6: Motecuhzoma leads Cortés on a tour of Tenochtitlan. Illustration by Keith Henderson

The major channel by which Nahuatl, and its dozens of language peers in Meso-America, became known to the new Spanish masters and their agents was the institution of mestizaje, mixed unions that generated families of children bilingual in Spanish and some other language. They would have arisen naturally as the Spanish immigrants, overwhelmingly male, took Indian wives or mistresses (mancebas) and began to raise families with them. Among the famous conquistadores, almost every one had mestizo children, often with several different women, and (in these cases at least) they were fully recognized as heirs to their fathers. Cortés, Pizarro, Benalcázar, Alvarado all conform to this tradition. There were large numbers of less celebrated Spanish men who did the same.
Combined with the school education that the Spanish began to supply to the children of elite Nahuatl-speaking families, this actually led to something of a literary flowering.

Pic 8: Painting of mestizos at the end of the 18th century or beginning of 19th century. Unknown author, public domain

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But besides “natural increase” of bilingualism after the conquest, the Catholic Church, and particularly its orders of friars, applied a technology that arose from a new conceptual revolution, to multiply artificially the number of bilinguals, and especially of bilingual priests. This was the advance now known as “grammatisation”, beginning in the late 15th century with Spanish and Italian, but then spreading all over western Europe: in this new movement, contemporary with the Renaissance, it was recognized that every language (not just classical Greek and Latin) could be characterized in an Arte, a treatise of grammatical rules, which – with a dictionary – could be used to learn the language as an adult, by the same familiar methods that all learned men had learnt their Latin. Language learning was – in principle – a solved problem.

Pic 10: Auctioned copy of Antonio Rincon’s ‘Arte Mexicana’, the first published work by a mestizo, first indigenous-language work written by a native speaker, and first work in an indigenous language of Mexico written by a Jesuit

After a decade of research, readers, grammars and dictionaries began to be published. Printing presses were installed in Mexico City in 1535, an immense investment in technology – just a generation after the first in Madrid in 1500. Their first known product, the Breve y más compendiosa doctrina christiana, which came out in 1539, was for ecclesiastical use, and written in Nahuatl. In 1546 it was followed by Fray Alonso de Molina’s Doctrina christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, and in 1547 Arte de la lengua mexicana by Father Andres de Olmos, and an accompanying volume Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana. In this, Lengua mexicana meant Nahuatl, at the time still the principal lingua franca of New Spain, as it had been of its predecessor, the Aztec (Mexica) empire.

Pic 12: The home of the first printing press/print shop in the New World, at the corner of Moneda and Licenciado Primo Verdad streets in Mexico City

One of the very first missionaries in Mexico, Pedro de Gante [Peter of Ghent, since that was his origin], who arrived in 1523, had had the idea of reaching the commoners - who were not being educated by the friars, unlike the children of nobles – through song and dance, since that seemed to be basic to their worship of their own gods:-
’For when they were to sacrifice for any purpose... before they killed them, they had to sing before the idol. When I realized this and that all their songs were dedicated to the gods, I composed some very stately verses concerning God’s law and the Faith, and how God became man in order to save the human race, and how he was born of the Virgin Mary though she remained pure and immaculate.’
He had found this most effective in building enthusiasm, and continued it throughout a whole celebration of Christmas. The children proved gifted in picking up the new songs, and there was some spontaneous creation of new ones, or new words for old song-tunes. A new tradition of Christian song was born.

Pic 14: Page from the ‘Doctrina Cristiana’ book written in Nahuatl in 1583 by Franciscan missionary Pedro de Gante

Sahagún’s work is not arranged around the Biblical book of Psalms, but the feast-days of the Catholic calendar. This means its content can range freely over significant moments in Christian history, provided only they are linked with some saint. It is a purely Christian work, with no allusions to the original Psalms of King David. It can hardly recall the characteristic spirit of Aztec poetry – a kind of elegant despair before an unyielding universe – but it is a highly competent stylistic pastiche of it.
Finally, we can mention another story, among the best known in the early years of Christian America: how the poor self-effacing Mexican Juan Diego was called by a mysterious lady – none other than the Virgin Mary – to visit the newly appointed bishop of his town, and so persuade him to dedicate a chapel to her worship. It is a tale of humble piety, reinforced through astounding miracles. It is told, in perfect Nahuatl of literary quality, in a tract entitled Huei tlamahuiçoltica “by a great miracle”, published in 1649, a century after the events that it recounts (“Ten years after the City of Mexico was conquered, with the arrows and shields put aside, when there was peace in all the towns... the year 1531...”) . Although there are – of course – secular doubts as to its historical truth, there are none as to its sincerity, or its significance in the story of how Mexico came to accept the Catholic faith from conquistadores.

Pic 16: Virgin of Guadalupe circa 1700s, oil on canvas painting, anonymous, Indianapolis Museum of Art

The motive for this disruptive new policy was external, coming from new ideas of the European Enlightenment. They suggested that rulers might increase both general well-being, and their own wealth, by imposing new, more rational, government on their subjects. Linguistic diversity, seen as a needless complication, was an immediate target. So was the temporal power of the Catholic church, which was becoming resented for its old-fashioned ways: its tradition of easy-going acceptance of the old “savage” languages could be used to attack it.
Once the single and standardized lengua general of Mexico, it is now a language of scattered village communities, formalized by no norm at all, so that the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in a survey of the 1980s, discerned 19 quite different varieties.

Pic 18: ‘The areas marked in green on the map are the traditional Nahuatl homelands where the Nahuatl languages are still spoken today’ - from the SIL website