Hacker Remix

Náhuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico

143 points by bryanrasmussen 3 days ago | 62 comments

jf 18 hours ago

I’ve been paying more attention to Náhuatl after reading “The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction” [0] and seeing the names of my great uncles and great aunts in there (e.g. Xochitl, Nezahualcoyotl) which opened a mystery of sorts. My grandmother and her older brother had very classically Mexican names and the four younger siblings had Náhuatl names, but why? My great aunts didn’t know but I suspect that the answer is related to the “Indigenismo” movement in Mexico [1], which may also be behind the linguistic renaissance that this article describes.

My personal ties to this history aside, it’s fascinating to see how many Náhuatl words made it into Mexican Spanish and into English and beyond! [2]

Footnotes:

0: https://academic.oup.com/book/481

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenismo_in_Mexico

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Nah...

WillAdams 12 hours ago

I'm most of the way through:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...

which has a very interesting discussion of how the native usage of these languages was affected by the Catholic Church and the children/descendants of immigrants.

Ages ago, there was an article on how earthen homes were traditional in many parts of South America (_not_ Pueblo) and the advantages of them --- folks lived quite well in this part of the world for millennia before Columbus and those who followed him --- and it is due to their innovations that Malthus' math was incorrect, which we should all recall the next time we have a potato chip, or eat anything made of maize.

mapt 10 hours ago

I'm sure you know, but even seeing the distinction between "Classically Mexican names" and "Náhuatl names" strikes me as weird, since the place we get the word "Mexico" is the "Mexica" tribe that were the dominant of the three Nahua tribes that constituted the Aztec Empire on colonization.

internet_points 14 hours ago

where would we be without https://hisdarkmaterials.fandom.com/wiki/Chocolatl

Findeton 8 hours ago

And remember that this is possible because the Spanish did respect the old culture. Actually it was the mexicans after their independence that tried to remove it.

jordigh 8 hours ago

The hell, respect the old culture? They couldn't completely stamp it out, more like it, but there was no respect there. Some native culture survived despite the Spaniards' attempts, but there was no respect whatsoever. The closest thing to "respect" was stuff like Bartomolé de las Casas thinking that it was cruel to enslave the natives because they weren't strong enough, so it would be better to bring Africans to America and enslave them instead (which he later also regretted, but the damage was done).

I don't even know where could you have possibly gotten the idea that the Spaniards were respectful. Were you told the Leyenda Rosa in school?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_legend

jaoane 1 hour ago

Complaining about the pink legend whilst you parrot the points of the black legend…

blovescoffee 6 hours ago

First, understand that Mexicans are a diverse group of people, some with very “Spanish” lineages. Second, the Spanish intentionally erased very large portions of indigenous culture. The Spanish colonizers absolutely did not “respect” the old culture except for very specific and unique instances. I’m not sure how you can possibly say as much? It’s essentially genocide erasure.

Anyways, the Mexican government currently communicates in a variety of indigenous languages on official forms and so they’re certainly trying to reinvigorate those traditions now.

Could you explain where you got the idea that the Spanish as a whole respected indigenous culture in mesoamerica ?

jdgoesmarching 4 hours ago

Only on this website could you have someone confidently state that the genocidal colonizers of Spain “respected the culture.” This is so wrong and offensive it could be part of Grok’s system prompt.

dhosek 8 hours ago

I don’t know much about Náhuatl, but the term “Mayan Language” is a bit misleading as there are actually numerous Mayan languages, something I’d never really thought about before I did a service trip to Chiapas and Guatemala in the early 90s and was exposed to the Jacalteco language which is just one of many Mayan languages.

Mexico is probably the most linguistically diverse country of the world with 68¹ indigenous languages spoken (I had thought India might be a close competitor where it seems there’s a different language in every state, each with its own alphabet, but Wikipedia says that there are “only” 22 scheduled languages in India).

We have a tendency to flatten indigenous cultures (like the bizarre mixing of culturally and linguistically distinct Native American cultures) and this is even more true of the Mesoamerican cultures where a diverse group like the Mayans is treated as a monolithic entity (as well as one that’s extinct) rather than as the diverse and living culture that it is.

⸻

1. The Wikipedia article on languages of Mexico has differing numbers throughout the article, offering 68, 65 and 62 as the number of officially recognized languages (and maybe more options if I weren’t skimming so quickly).

fdgjgbdfhgb 7 hours ago

While Mexico is certainly very linguistically diverse, it doesn't even come close to Papua New Guinea's over 800 languages [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guine...

danans 6 hours ago

What's interesting about Papua New Guinea's linguistic diversity is how it correlates with its topography. Sometimes steep mountain ranges have effectively separated peoples from each-other for thousands of years, to the point that their languages sometimes became mutually unintelligible even if they were only separated by a very small distance. This phenomenon also occurs in other parts of the world (the Caucuses, the Himalayas), but TTBOMK nowhere else to the degree of Papua New Guinea.

canvascritic 8 hours ago

Right: Maya is a "language continuum" in the sense that geographically proximate speakers tend to understand each other well, and intelligibility goes down as you move further away from any given individual on the continuum

doubletwoyou 8 hours ago

Oh! So it’s like how there’s many Italian “dialects” that become less mutually intelligible the farther away you go?

jerf 7 hours ago

Prior to general travel for everyone being affordable, and broadcast media like television that can go everywhere, languages were affected by the same forces everywhere. So you'd get that effect pretty much everywhere in the world.

Even a lot of things that we think of as "the" version of a language are often effectively a particular dialect out of a complicated tapestry of local dialects being something that "everybody" has to learn because it is the language spoken by your rulers. It happened to "win" because the people speaking that dialect also won the local military conflicts and became the language of the court.

dhosek 5 hours ago

Indeed, the French taught in schools is Parisian French, but French as its spoken, e.g., in the south sounds noticeably different.

williamdclt 4 hours ago

Not wrong, but note that the difference is much less than language differences between different English speakers in England, even at short geographical distances.

benced 7 hours ago

The 22 in India are just the ones the government recognizes and sometimes communicates in. There’s way more (low hundreds I think).

eschulz 10 hours ago

It's nice to think about how there are millions of people in Mexico who speak indigenous languages to one degree or another. Years ago I visited my grandfather who was in a nursing home in Mexico City, and there was a young girl working as an aide who must have been no more than 18 years old. My aunt told me that the girl barely spoke any Spanish. Noticing my immediate confusion, my aunt replied with one word I had never heard before: Zapotec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_languages

neilshev 10 hours ago

I always pay attention to efforts of restoration for endangered languages. Unfortunately, it seems to be an awfully difficult thing to do. In my home country, Ireland, we have been trying for around a century to restore/preserve Irish. But it has gone fairly poorly. It seems that falling below a critical mass of speakers, the language is nearly always considered 'useless'/'ancient'.

It seems to be very common across countries to have a bi-lingual population. But this is almost always the case where the native language is globally uncommon. So the population see the value of learning English/Spanish etc.

It also appears to be possible to keep languages healthy, active when there are many competing, but regional languages, not used anywhere else.

But it seems near impossible to revive a language where the majority already speak a globally useful language.

The alternative, unfortunately, seems to be to force the language through authoritarianism, like in the case of hebrew.

cogman10 9 hours ago

A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them. It similarly happened to native american tribes in the US and canada.

By my estimation, the two things that kill a language is the death of the native speakers of that language (discussed above) and the evolution of a language past what native speakers would recognize (Old/proto english and Latin for example).

stackedinserter 8 hours ago

USSR didn't try to "exterminate" Ukrainian, where did you get this? We spoke Ukrainian all my childhood, it was taught at school, there were TV shows, magazines and newspapers in Ukrainian. It was alive and very actively used, at least in 80's.

cobbzilla 7 hours ago

I know some Ukrainians who say the exact opposite— Russian was taught in schools, all the big important jobs went to Russians, at firms where Russian was spoken, government business was conducted in Russian, and so on. It’s curious how these accounts can be so different, so I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met in person on many occasions.

stackedinserter 5 hours ago

Russian was and is used because it's a common denominator, like English here in Canada. French is actually forced into our education, media and public jobs. But yet, English is a standard language in companies, government and so on. Does it mean that Canada "exterminating" French?

> I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met

It's totally up to you who to believe. Just make sure that what they say matches reality. And reality is that Russian is still used in majority of Ukrainian companies as standard language, even after 30+ years of independence. We work with contractors from Ukraine and they all communicate in Russian perfectly well.

cogman10 8 hours ago

I had a Ukrainian friend and I thought he'd told me that Russian was strongly encouraged. I thought the state had a stronger policy towards making sure everyone spoke russian.

I just looked it up and it appears that wasn't something the USSR ever really did.

stackedinserter 5 hours ago

It was "strongly encouraged" in the way that English is "strongly encouraged" in any US company. 3/4 of the company can speak Hindi but in all hands meeting everyone speaks English because it's the only language that everyone in the room understands and speaks (poorly, lol).

thaumasiotes 7 hours ago

It would have been the normal thing to do. But the USSR went the other way because it was committed to the idea of being several separate soviet republics, so it pushed the idea of Ukrainian language and culture as something distinct from Russian in order to present the idea of a Soviet Ukrainian Republic as something distinct from the Soviet Russian Republic.

barry-cotter 8 hours ago

> A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.

> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

Agreed.

> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.

“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.

alephnerd 9 hours ago

> Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both

Poland was not in the USSR. Polish remained the working language in the Polish People's Republic

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate

Hindi-Urdu was never exterminated by the British. In fact, it was the British that helped make it the de facto language in most of South Asia.

Before the British, Dari was the working language of administration. When the British began co-opting local administrations in the 19th century, Hindi-Urdu was used as the primary register, and my family has ancestral documents showing this change (Dari/Farsi to Urdu/Hindi to English for land documents).

---------

The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

asimpletune 8 hours ago

Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus.

pqtyw 7 hours ago

Well yes but people who identified as Polish (e.g. upper/middle class and urban residents) were deported or a given a chance to leave west.

alephnerd 7 hours ago

> Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus

I don't want to touch that hot potato, but that region was extremely diverse, with a large Belarusian, Lithuanian, Yiddish (before WW2 sadly), German, and Ukrainian speaking populations. I don't think any ethnic group had an actual definitive majority in that region until after WW2.

barry-cotter 7 hours ago

Completely irrelevant to whether the Polish language and cultural identity was suppressed. Most of historic Prussia is now part of Poland. No one claims that German was suppressed in East Germany.

barry-cotter 8 hours ago

> The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

Entirely different my ass. Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears. There are some areas with a great deal of borrowing of vocabulary but you could say the same thing of modern Russian or Japanese and no one would say they were “entirely different” from the language of 1800.

alephnerd 7 hours ago

> Entirely different my ass

I do NOT appreciate that tone.

.להזדיין

> Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears.

Modern English and Shakespearean or Medieval English are very different, and I feel the difference between modern colloquial Hebrew and liturgical Hebrew are similar.

barry-cotter 7 hours ago

תודה על הדעה. אני מסיים כאן

alephnerd 9 hours ago

Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.

On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

I remember a decade ago the USCIS went on a hiring binge for Mayan interpreters becuase there was an influx of Guatemalan undocumented immigrants due to the economic collapse following their domestic instability.

pqtyw 7 hours ago

By the 20th century. The Irish language was quite alive and Irish speakers made up a majority in several major areas before the Great Famine (which obviously and not at all surprisingly disproportionally affected Irish speakers due to the pseudo-genocidal policies of the British government)

alephnerd 5 hours ago

Makes sense. I thought it had died out by the early 20th century, but based on census data it didn't die out but did see a rapid decline.

That said, I was thinking post-famine.

barry-cotter 8 hours ago

> Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.

Absolute bollocks. Irish is still a living language in daily use today , albeit the last monoglot almost certainly died before 1950. Of the Celtic languages Cornish is at best a zombie, revived on the basis of its incredibly close relationship to Breton. Manx has been on life support or at death’s door for 70 years, but there was still at least one fluent nerve speaker when it became something more passed on in classes than in daily life. Welsh is in relatively good health and Irish and Scots Gaelic are living languages used in daily life in small, marginal areas.

> On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Yes. The Spanish spread them with their empire after the empires that first spoke them were conquered.