Montezuma ran a vibrant empire from one of the world's largest cities... with an amazing
headdress! But unlike his Mayan neighbors, he didn't leave us books and monuments full
of sentences. And yet we know the Aztecs called him Huēyi Tlahtoāni, not Emperor, that he
didn't call chocolate "chocolate" and that Montezuma is not how he said his name.
No, no, that's not it either!
After college, I went through linguistics withdrawal. So I tore through any languagey
book I could, including Empires of the Word. Right away there's this epic encounter between
Spanish Conquistadors and the Aztec Emperor. But if we see a people inevitably about to
be wiped from history, this book saw two high cultures meeting across a great divide, each
telling their own story in their own words. I lowered the book. Their own words.
We know how Montezuma spoke?
Turns out, we do! Partly because, while some brought swords to the New World, others reached
for pens. And informants. They wrote histories! And dictionaries! And rough grammars with
tips about Aztec. Well, the Mexican Language, Nāhuatl.
Tips like, when you see two consonants in a row, pronounce both: a house was /kalli/,
not /kaji/ like if this were Spanish.
Tips like there are only four vowels: a e i o. So if you spot an u, it's really just
an o in disguise. The word for flower is xochitl.
Vowels can be long, too: ā ē ī ō. A flower isn't just xochitl, it's xōchitl.
Spelling is clunky, but it works if we see it as Spanish letters layered over simple
Aztec sets: za ce ci zo ca que qui co tza tze tzi tzo. Linguists would've done
a better job, but bygones.
Above all, the old grammars show off the structure of Nāhuatl. Nouns attach affixes. (Oh, do they ever.)
Nāntli, nāntzintli, tonān, tonāntzin, titonāntzin, tonāntziné.
Verbs use "incorpration", jamming things we'd call different words into a single verby body:
nicuā, nitlacuā, nitamalcuā. The grammar only gets more fun from there!
But there's a lot these premodern grammars don't tell us. Take a concrete example. An
important one: chocolate. We suspect it must've come from xocolātl, bitter water, but there's
no trace of that in the early literature. In classical times, the base word for the
bean and the drink was cacahuatl.
To sort out all these missing words and sounds, look into Montezuma's future... and his past.
Montezuma's Aztecs also had books, āmoxtli! I was always told āmoxtli were full of pictographs
not real writing, but experts are taking a second look. Spell the word cihuātl "woman"
as you like, here's how one glyph does: with two bars. The bars stand for the syllable
"wa". Compare that to the way colonial writers spelled the sound w: āhuacatl, huēyi, nocihuāuh.
So this isn't a vowel "u", it's an h plus u representing the consonant "w".
But our best evidence comes from modern mouths. Yep, people still speak Nāhuatl! They may
call it mācēhualli, meaning "commoner", or even just "Mexican", but they help pin
down its sounds. Those uh's do indeed correspond to w's. There really are four vowels, and
this fourth vowel drifts freely between o and u, which explains
those earlier spelling variations.
And elephant in the room, or jaguar in the temple, but this t-l all over the place is
/tɬ/, /tɬ/, /tɬa/!
You'll even hear two k sounds: /k/ as in "skull", calli, plus a tricky /kw/ made by rounding
your lips: cuā, cuīca. This sound can even end a syllable: tēuc. The spelling here is
awkward and inconsistent. Today I'm going with this one. Tie all this pronunciation
analysis together and we can dig up a glimpse of what Montezuma's name sounded like in his
day: Mo-tēuc-zō-ma. Motēuczōma.
But out of respect, you might want to add the polite suffix: Motēuczōmatzin. Do you
hear that? "Tsin̥" not "tsiN"! Certain consonants were voicelss at the end of a syllable. Try
this one, nocacahuauh, with voiced w in the middle and a voiceless w at the end! L's are
particularly noticeable there: not āltepētl but āɬtepētɬ.
But there were still too many unknowns. Remember your favorite sound? Well, some speakers
ditch it. They say Nahuat or Nahual! Who's right?
Or take this h before a consonant. Colonial texts imprecisely called it a saltillo, a
skip. (C'mon, the IPA wasn't even invented yet!) Today most people say mēxi[h]ca; a
few say mēxi[ʔ]ca. Which one's older?
Zoom out from Nāhuatl to see its siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents. Carefully
comparing them for patterns, linguists proved they're part of a Uto-Aztecan family that
stretches from Central America up to the western US.
Linguists, including this guy, Whorf, placed Nahuatl within that history. Whorf worked
out that an early "t" sound changed into "tl". Oh, so Nahuat is older! Wait. Later linguists
showed this change applied to the entire Nahuan branch. "Nahuat" and "Nahual" were the innovations.
So keep practicing your "tl"!
The pesky saltillo, that sound you lop off words when you borrow them even if it's the
Aztec name for themselves, that was even more elusive. But hard work showed a syllable-final
stop, like a k or a t, turning into a catch-in-your-throat before becoming the popular hhh sound. In
the old days, they said: mēxihcatl, tlahtōlli, tlahtoāni.
Oh, and they stressed the second-to-last syllable: cuīcatl, Huēyi Tlahtoāni.
So Aztec had a family!
shared the same features, including a special ritual language.
Aztec ritual speech was unlike the common mācēhualli speech. Elite schools, calmecac,
taught noble children the old ways, in Huēhuehtlahtōlli. So if you've been paying attention, you know
that xōchitl means flower and cuīcatl means song. Well, you still need ancient parallelisms
to grasp the noble phrase in noxōchiuh in nocuīcauh, a stylish way to say "my poem".
This is the same ritual language from my tale of the fall of the empire: in mātzin in motepētzin
just to say "your city".
He was at the crossroads of an ancient language, one that wasn't just about articulating Nāhuatl
sounds or building intricate words, but making your speech ring with poetry like a real emperor.
I mean, Huēyi Tlahtoāni.
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