Nahuatl Orthography - Orthographical History

Orthographical History

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly pictographs supplemented by a few ideograms. When needed, it also used syllabic equivalences; Father Diego Durán recorded how the tlàcuilòquê (codex painters) could render a prayer in Latin using this system, but it was difficult to use. This writing system was adequate for keeping such records as genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists, but could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the old world or of the Maya civilization could. The Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told; the elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for teaching, and long texts were memorized.

The Spanish introduced the Latin alphabet, which was then utilized to record a large body of Aztec prose and poetry, a fact which somewhat mitigated the devastating loss of the thousands of Aztec manuscripts which were burned by the Spanish. (See Aztec codices.) Important lexical works (e.g. Alonso de Molina's classic Vocabulario of 1571) and grammatical descriptions (of which Horacio Carochi's 1645 Arte is generally acknowledged the best) were produced using variations of this orthography.

The Classical Nahuatl orthography was not perfect, and in fact there were many variations in how it was applied, due in part to dialectal differences and in part to differing traditions and preferences that developed. (The writing of Spanish itself was far from totally standardized at the time.) Today, although almost all written Nahuatl uses some form of Latin-based orthography, there continue to be strong dialectal differences, and considerable debate and differing practices regarding how to write sounds even when they are the same. Major issues include:

• Whether to follow Spanish in writing /k/ sometimes as and sometimes as or just to use
• How to write /kʷ/
• What to do about /w/, the realization of which varies considerably from place to place and even within a single dialect
• How to write the saltillo, phonetically a glottal stop or an, which has been spelled with j, h, and a straight apostrophe ('), but which traditionally was often omitted in writing.
• Whether and how to represent vowel length

There are a number of other issues as well, such as

• Whether and how to represent allophones (sound variants), which approximate different Spanish phonemes, especially variants of o which come close to u
• To what extent writing in one variant should be adapted towards what is used in other variants.