Nahuatl Orthography - Historical Transcription Methodologies

Historical Transcription Methodologies

When the Spanish friars began transcribing Nahuatl into the Latin alphabet they, naturally, made use of Spanish language practices as a basis for the Nahuatl script. While the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ (English ), the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (English sound), and the voiceless stops (/p t k/) sounded the same in both Spanish and Nahuatl, Spanish lacked the voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/, the lateral alveolar affricate /t͡ɬ/, and the glottal stop /ʔ/ (the break between the vowels in English Uh-oh).

Thus, Nahuatl written in the Latin alphabet is very similar to that of Spanish with a few exceptions:

• Words are stressed on the second-to-the-last vowel (excluding )
• does not occur as an independent vowel.
• represents /ʃ/ (as it did in Spanish; the Spanish phoneme transcribed with later shifted to a voiceless velar fricative, now written in most cases, while the Náhuatl phoneme transcribed with remained unchanged).
• represents a geminated .
• is /t͡ɬ/, a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate. This is a type of sound not found in any European languages but commonly found in indigenous North and Central American languages.
• and both represent /kʷ/.