Nahuatl Quotes

In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio.

All the earth is a grave, and nought escapes it; nothing is so perfect that it does not fall and disappear. The rivers, brooks, fountains and waters flow on, and never return to their joyous beginnings; they hasten on to the vast realms of Tlaloc, and the wider they spread between their marges the more rapidly do they mould their own sepulchral urns. That which was yesterday is not to-day; and let not that which is to-day trust to live to-morrow.

Most of what's known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his "Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain". He'd originally meant it to be something of a "field guide to the heathens" to help priests recognize and exterminate indigenous religious rites and their practitioners. In the process of his documentation, though, it's clear from his writings that Father Ruiz de Alarcón grew sympathetic. He was particularly fascinated with how Nahuatl people celebrated the sacred in ordinary objects, and encouraged living and spirit realities to meet up in the here and now. He noted that the concept of "death" as an ending did not exactly exist for them. When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers' markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo.

Of course we do. We are the wisest creatures on this planet. Only humans who can speak aquatic nahuatl ever realize this. The rest of them view us as food or cute pets or the source of potential medicines to regrow limbs. They only want to exploit us. They never speak to us. They never ask us what we want.

[A]ng tiyanggê ay isang salitang Aztec . . . [A]ng salitang “tata” bilang isang tawag ng paggalang sa matandang lipunan ng Mexico. Akala ko, ito at ang tatay ay katutubo't mas maipagmamalaking kapalit sa “papa” at “daddy.” Subalit totoong marami pa tayong salitang Mexican sa ating pagkain dahil marami sa mga gulay at bungangkahoy natin ngayon ang mula sa mga binhing buhat sa Mexico. Ang iba sa mga halamang ito ay kilala natin sa pangalang Espanyol, tulad ng kalabasa, tsiko, at sapote. Pero may mga pangalan na korupsiyon ng orihinal gaya ng kamatsile na mula sa Aztec na cuamuchtl at pinaghanguan din ng Ingles na guamachil. Isa pa, ang abokado na mula sa Espanyol na avocado. Pero hango ito sa Nahuatl na ahuacatI---na ang literal na kahulugan ay 'bayag.

Do we have to be dead and dug up from the ground to be worthy of respect? —José Ignacio Rivera (Apache/Nahuatl)

But phonology, vocabulary and grammar are just the beginning of what makes languages differ. Just as each person has a distinctive manner of speaking, quite apart from a recognisable voice, there is a characteristic style of expression which goes with each language. This difference may be minimised when languages are in close proximity, and very often translated one into another, as tends to be the case, say, among the languages of western Europe. But it is always there implicitly, and stands out very clearly in the encounter of Nahuatl with Spanish.

Every language defines a community, the people who speak it and can understand one another. A language acts not just as a means of communication among them but a banner of their distinct identity, often to the despair of national governments trying to forge a single identity for all their different language communities. This can have quite perverse effects. It is no coincidence that Nahuatl, with many other ancestral languages of Mexico, largely disappeared from written use towards the end of the eighteenth century, just when political movements led by urban Spanish speakers were raising consciousness of Mexico as a separate country with a view to independence. The contrast between Spanish-speaking mestizos and 'Indians' speaking the ancient languages of Mexico was seen as a distraction from the emergence of the indentity of the true Mexican. The older languages, seen as 'backward', had to go.

speaking Nahuatl was laughable; the project of building a church on a hill where pagans worshipped the mother goddess Tonantzin, borderline heretic. Juan Diego went home dejected. But

Nahuatl has greatly enriched Mexican Spanish with loan words, and has contributed such words as ocelot, coyote, tomato, chocolate, tamale, and copal to the English language.

The word “Aztec,” though, is of modern origin. The inhabitants of ancient Mexico would have preferred to call themselves “Mexica,” and they were a part of a larger group called the Nahua, whose language was Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the time. Many words in Nahuatl survive in the Spanish spoken in Mexico today.

The advancing tribes who may have pressured Cahokia or exploited the chaos were peoples speaking Uto-Nahuatl or Uto-Aztecan languages moving eastwards from California. Some stayed in the north – later they became the Comanche and Shoshane peoples – but many others, gradually over centuries, were drawn to the rich cities and fecund land of the Valley of Mexico and migrated south. They all came from a semi-mythical land they called Aztlan – origin of the word Aztec. In around 1300, one of the poorest and latest to arrive were the Mexica (pronounced me-sheek-a), who were treated as outcasts and driven on to the least desirable land.

Many such ethnic groups influenced the formation of the Mexican nation. Before the Conquest, major indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Zapotec, and Totonac featured a whistled-only dialect. After the Conquest, migrants from the Canary Islands, home of the world’s most famous whistled language, Silbo Gomero, were among the first settlers of Texas. And since the past is ever present for Mexicans, it makes sociological sense to argue that the Mexican propensity to whistle-talk, like our obsession with death and Three Flowers brilliantine, is a (literally) breathing cultural artifact.

whether the Mexican in question flushes his soiled toilet paper or tosses it in the trash can. Another surefire way is the ch/sh phonetic test. Proper Spanish doesn’t feature a sh sound (known among linguists as a linguapalatal fricative), so most Mexicans pronounce English words with a sh sound with the harsher ch (known as a lingualveolar affricate). However, many indigenous Mexican tongues use linguapalatal fricatives. The most famous example is in the original pronunciation of Mexico: as said in Nahuatl, the word sounds like “meh-shee-ko.” The Spaniards couldn’t pronounce the middle consonant, though, instead substituting a guttural j (as in “Meh-hee-ko”) early in the Conquest. They killed most of Mexico’s Indians in the ensuing decades, but the indigenous sh sound never wholly disappeared;

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well. Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

1848)​The avocado derives its name from the Nahuatl Indian word “ãhuacatl,” meaning testicle