Mesoamerican quiz time!
Aztec or Mayan?
Aztec... or Mayan?
Aztec or... Mayan?
One more: Aztec or Mayan?
Believe it or not, these are two totally different languages.
Well, almost.
There are fundamental differences, but there's also one of history's strangest linguistic
mind melds happening here.
So often I find "Aztecs" and "Mayans" mentioned in the same breath or the same keystrokes.
So I can almost forgive you for not knowing the difference between the languages.
Almost.
But after we're done here, no excuses!
Ok, first, we're not dealing with TWO languages here.
Hardly.
See, Aztec, which usually goes by the name Nāhuatl "clear" or I guess "clear speech",
is just one branch at the southern edge of a much larger family tree.
The Uto-Aztecan language family stretches from Idaho in the US all the way down to
El Salvador.
Classical Nāhuatl is the language spoken by the people you're probably thinking of
when I say Aztecs, but the modern Nahuan branch actually includes a whole cluster of closely
related languages and dialects.
Mayan is another story.
Actually, lots of stories, because it's an entire language family.
Each one of these is a Mayan language.
Just to keep you on your toes, speakers of some of these individual languages call their
own language "Maya", even when we don't.
To linguists, this is Yucatec, but it's really "màaya t'àan".
This one here "Chontal" is just the Nahuatl word chontalli, meaning "foreigner".
What do they themselves call it though?
Well, usually yokot'an "correct language".
But also "Mayan".
To spot some differences between Aztec and Mayan, compare basic words.
My last video was all about the tactical use of the languages in the Spanish conquest.
Cortés, Aguilar and the star of the show, Malintzin, used Nāhuatl and Chontal to turn
an empire against itself.
I'll be pulling examples from these same two languages to show off Aztec versus Mayan.
Just a heads up though.
I have a little more experience with Uto-Aztecan than Maya.
I once got into another rather different Uto-Aztecan language, and I've spent more time with Classical
Nahuatl than any one Mayan language.
Hopefully that explains any glitches in pronunciation.
Let me start by handpicking things that stand out about their sounds.
Nahuatl is known for that distinctive "tl", and for this saltillo "skip", or glottal stop,
that's often between a vowel and a consonant.
It's awkward at first, but try tl-ing and skipping to get a feel for it for yourself:
mēxihcatl, tlahtoāni.
Besides a couple affricates and a difference between a regular "c" and a "cu" made by rounding
your lips, nothing else is too scary in the pronunciation department.
Nahuatl only has four vowels (no "u"!) but it does distinguish short ones from long ones:
a ā i ī.
Also, there's this relentless second-to-last syllable stress: pum-pum-PUM-pum.
Te-nōch-TI-tlan.
Yokot'an, on the other hand, has six vowels, and its consonants include the ever-so-Mayan
ejective stops that build up and release air pressure.
Call them exotic, call them aggressive - personally, I like 'em - but they're on full display in
this Mayan language.
So let me try this: chich versus ch'ich'.
Pos and p'os.
Basic nouns in Maya are a simple affair, often just one syllable.
So nouns like ch'uj and na' are are ready to use.
No fanciness.
No plural endings.
Of course this makes compounding super common.
Not necessarily longest-word-in-the-world kind of compounding, but still: ch'ujna'.
Nouns that refer to people are often prefixed with aj "male" or ix "female", even when that's
not information you're used to including in English: ixc'ay, ajc'ay, ajyocot'an, ixyocot'an,
aj'chäme.
What about Nāhuatl nouns?
Well, I hope you've been practicing your "tl" because you're gonna need it!
On their own, Nahuatl nouns have a base plus an ending, like mēxihca-tl.
Depending on the last letter in the root, the noun's suffix might take another shape,
which is why "house" is cal-li not cal-tl.
If the noun is alive, it has an animate plural.
So one mēxihcatl, many mēxihcah.
Inanimate calli stays calli.
(Your house isn't alive, is it?)
Now comes the fun part.
Nahuatl nouns love to be possessed... by possessive prefixes.
Knock off the ending, attach a pronoun prefix, and the party's at no-cal "my house" or mo-cal
"your house" but definitely not at *nocalli.
Similar pronoun bits are very valuable in Yokot'an, but not in a way that's so bound
up with every noun and makes it change its shape: na', a na', u na'.
It's possible to think of Aztec and Mayan core words like nouns and verbs as sentence-builders
in their own right.
Check out what happens when you build a sentence using just the noun, and adding the subject
marker to it, like going from na' and u na' to u na'et in Maya, or mēxihcatl and timēxihcatl
in Aztec.
I spent some time with nouns and possessives because this is an inkling of a similarity
worth keeping in mind.
We'll build on it later.
When it comes to verbs, both languages care about transitivity.
In Nahuatl, you take a verb like huetzi, maca or cuā and tack on a subject.
These are the same subjects we used to build sentences out of nouns: timēxihcatl, tihuetzi,
timaca.
You can then add in your object: nimaca, nicmaca, nicuā, niccuā or even nitlacuā with that
fancy "unknown object".
I think transitivity is an even bigger player in Mayan, beyond just the shape of the verb.
In some tenses/aspects, Mayan displays something called ergativity.
The short story is this: if a Mayan verb is intransitive, then its subject looks like
an object.
Take a transitive verb, a k'uxi, where you are the subject.
And you're still the subject in the intransitive verb wäyet, even though you look different.
This sets Mayan apart from both English and Nahuatl, since we use the same subjects for
transitive and intransitive verbs.
I am the same in I eat it, niccuā, and in I fall, nihuetzi.
Accusative languages versus ergative languages, that probably just made your eyes glaze over!
Let me resuscitate you with something easier: prepositions.
You know these guys, you've got them in English!
Chontal's got 'em too, and it uses them for location and relation.
So if you remember tak'in was money, we can just say t'ok tak'in for "with money".
That's not how Nahuatl works, though.
It uses postfixes for these kinds of time and place relationships.
Like, the one for togetherness is -huān: mo-huān "with you".
Or location, -co: calco "in the house".
These go beyond our prepositions though.
Switch off your Indo-European mind and think internationally for this one.
Take a little word that seems atomic, unbreakable even, like "and".
Yeah in Nahuatl "and" is a multi-part construction built using a postfix: īhuān "its togetherness"
or "with it"!
Ok, you are officially a linguistic warrior for sticking with me.
That was just a random grammar sampling, but you now have a jist of the differences between
these languages.
Time for the payoff!
With your refined grammatical palate, let's rewind and play the game again.
Aztec or Mayan?
Aztec... or Mayan?
Aztec or... Mayan?
Hahah, there we go.
But if you couldn't tell them apart before, I don't think it was just sheer ignorance.
You probably had hazy ideas of similarities and no real understanding of the differences.
But there was something to those similarities.
Something deep.
When you characterize a language, you probably go straight for what we call the genetic relationship.
What kind of language is Spanish?
Why, it's a Romance language!
What about Classical Nahuatl?
Uto-Aztecan, of course!
Chontal/Yokot'an?
That's Mayan.
All true.
And we can go around breaking up Precolumbian Mesoamerica into this patchwork of distinct,
color-coded language families.
If we stop there, though, we'll miss out on the best part of the story.
There's another factor that majorly influences languages in an almost bizarrely stealthy
kind of way.
When languages, even totally and utterly unrelated ones, live side by side for a long time, they
start to exchange stuff.
Not just can-I-borrow-the-sugar or can I have your chocolate and chiles kind of stuff.
Sure, a Mayan language might borrow Aztec words, just as people all over the region
were sharing goods and ideas.
But that didn't leave a huge dent.
Instead of surface stuff like words and sounds, the languages of Mesoamerica started to trade
structure.
I don't want your nouns, I want the way your nouns and pronouns work to influence my nouns
and pronouns.
Linguists call this phenomenon a Sprachbund, a Language Area.
Aztec and Mayan participated in one of history's greatest, the Mesoamerican Language Area.
Show and tell time.
What kinds of linguistic mind-melds were happening here?
First, a simple one: word order.
Mesoamerica likes to keep verbs away from the end of a sentence.
Verb-subject-object is very Mayan, and, even though Classical Nahuatl was pretty free in
how it let you order words, it tended to like verb-subject-object or even verb-object-subject.
The languages that surround Mesoamerica though, they totally disagree.
They had no problem with a verb-final syntax, with subject-object-verb being very,
very common.
And those possessives?
They come back full force with the kind of awkward Mesoamerican way of saying that somebody
owns something.
It's like this: "her house the woman", "their bones the dogs".
In Aztec, I think you'd say īcal in cihuātl, īnomiuh in chichimeh, but it works the same
way all over.
Of course that "core words build sentences" concept from earlier comes back here, so have
fun with examples like īcal in mocihuāuh.
Back to Mesoamerican postpositions and prepositions.
Those time-space references love to include body parts.
So instead of saying "inside", why not īhtic "its stomach"?
For "around", use ītenco "on its lips".
Or try Maya pam "head" for "in front", like pam otot "at head of house" for in front of
the house.
They even count the same way.
Not with your decimal system.
Their system is base 20.
Aztec cempōhualli, 20, is literally just "one count".
Units like 80 are easy, just count in scores: nāppōhualli "four counts".
As a consequence, your major Mesoamerican milestones weren't hundreds or thousands,
but things like twenty-squared and twenty-cubed.
There are separate words for these, like the old Mayan bak or Nahuatl centzontli.
All of these and more are features of Mesoamerica.
Some are even rare outside of it, even in the very same language families!
The way to explain them is to look at how these languages converged around
the very same traits.
I find this fascinating.
In a way, it's like you can proudly keep the look and feel of your language but behind
the scenes we'll all agree to work differently.
Similarly!
Not differently.
Hehh.
Well, thanks for making it through this grammar class.
I know it's a bit of a switch, but I hope it helps you appreciate the
story from last time.
Or, you know, the next time you study a modern Mayan language.
Modern Mayan language?
Wait, didn't the Mayans, like, disappear or something?
Yeah, and I think that happened when the world ended back in December 2012.
Hah, no.
They didn't.
But that's... a story for another time.
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