Náhuatl Borrowings from Spanish

Into Nahuatl went a great many Spanish words. Their adoption was not at all random. The first to be borrowed were nouns, and among the borrowed nouns, the first were for objects and concepts new and alien to Mesoamerica. The astronomically determined 365-day year was not new, and the Nahuah continued to use their own word, xihuitl. Likewise, the lunar month of 28 days was enough like the months of the European year that the Nahuatl word me:tztli ‘moon’ could serve. On the other hand, the seven-day week was new, so by the mid-1500s Spanish semana had been borrowed into Nahuatl along with names for the days of the week, sometimes so integrated into Nahuatl as to not be readily recognizable. Xapatoh for sábado is an example. Likewise, the Spanish names for the months of the years were borrowed, even though the word for ‘month’ itself was not.

Many animals were introduced to Mesoamerica by the Spaniards, the most immediately impressive of them being the horse. For a while, the Nahuah referred to horses as teo:maza:tl ‘super deer’ and then settled for cahuayoh from Spanish caballo. Likewise, there were huacax ‘cattle’ from Spanish vacas. European pigs became a highly valued source of protein in the diet of Mesoamericans, but it was not necessary to borrow Spanish puerco, since Nahuatl had two words already, coyametl and pitzotl, both referring to the hairy little native peccary [American pig].

It took awhile for Nahuatl to develop a way to borrow Spanish verbs. When it finally happened, Nahuah all over Central Mexico pretty much simultaneously began adding the ending -oa: to the infinitive of Spanish verbs, thereby creating verb stems to which Nahuatl’s verbal suffixes could be attached. Firmar ‘to sign one’s name’ was a very important early verb borrowing, becoming firmaroa:. Once this got started, any verb could be borrowed, right down to this day, when the English verb to pitch from American baseball terminology has turned up in modern Nahuatl as pitzaroa:.

It can be argued that Nahuatl did not originally have a class or words that we would call adjectives. Since there is no grammatical gender and little number agreement in Nahuatl, anything in older texts that might be understood as an adjective can also be understood as a predicate noun or a noun embedded in an attributive construction. Nahuatl was slow to take in Spanish adjectives and generally treated them as nouns until perhaps as late as the beginning of the twentieth century.

Some modern Nahuah have been distressed by the ubiquity of Spanish loans of all sorts in their vocabulary and have made efforts to “purify” their language by creating neologisms, new words for new concepts such as cars, trains, and telephones, from core Nahuatl lexicon. This sometimes intimidates their fellow Nahuatl speakers and has the unintended effect of making them use their own language less and Spanish more. Purism has generally been a negative force in the preservation of modern Nahuatl.