#declensions

Chīrōn / Χείρων

Chiron

[An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. by Michel Launey, Université de Paris VII (Denis Diderot). Edited and translated by Christopher Mackay, University of Alberta. Print publication year: 2011. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521732291. Data thanks to publisher]

First, a bit of a back-story:  A short time ago, my wife and I were watching an old episode of the American Western TV show Rawhide.  This is the show that basically launched the career of actor Clint Eastwood.  In this particular episode, a fellow appears on the scene claiming to have walked over 1000 miles north from Cholula, Mexico into the heart of cattle country in Texas.  It happened that this fellow didn't speak a whole lot of Spanish because he came from a community that spoke primarily Nahuatl, which is the language of the Aztec Empire.  I was intrigued, and I remembered picking up a couple of Nahuatl references some years ago at a used-book store.  I subsequently retrieved the volume under review here and began reading it, not to learn Nahuatl but rather to gain an appreciation for its richness and nuances.

This volume was originally written in French; the version I have has been translated into English, and the language examples have been adapted to be idiomatic for English, by Christopher Mackay.  So while I will refer to Michel Launey as the author, it should be borne in mind that Mackay also had considerable input into the finished product.

One other important note:  This volume covers Classical Nahuatl - that is, Nahuatl as it was spoken and precipitated into written form following the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in the 16th Century.  Modern Nahuatl, although it has been somewhat conservatized due to the literary form, has still evolved and absorbed innovations across the language's Sprachbund (speaking area).  Consequently, this book is slightly less useful for conversational Nahuatl - it would be like trying to speak the English of Geoffrey Chaucer with a modern English speaker.  The modern Anglophile would certainly understand, but much of the language constructs would seem very odd and quaint (at best).

I have dabbled with approximately two dozen languages over the course of many years.  I haven't become fluent in many of them - in fact, there are those who question my fluency in English, but that's another story - but I have truly enjoyed the journey into these languages, especially those that are very different from my native tongue.  Nahuatl certainly qualifies in the latter category; it is an Uto-Aztecan language, and though quite ancient, is still spoken by over a million people, at least 10% of whom are mono-lingual - that is, they speak only Nahuatl.

In each of the aforementioned forays into new tongues, I have always had one or more reference books to guide me.  Many of them have been quite well-written.  However, I can say with certainty that to date, this volume is the best that I have encountered.  I simply cannot emphasize this enough:  this book is brilliantly written.  Its structure, tempo and content are all absolutely first-rate.

Launey divides the book into two sections.  The first sixteen lessons cover the rudiments of Nahuatl, from phonetics to basic verb and noun forms, conjugations, declensions where applicable, etc.  The remaining twenty lessons cover much more advanced topics and serve to illustrate the complexity and subtlety of Nahuatl.  Since Nahuatl is an indigenous language of North America, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to English.  This is certainly true in terms of vocabulary, but what's more, the syntax and semantics of the language are quite different from English as well.  For example, the canonical feature triad of languages - tense, aspect, and mood, or T-A-M - have very different emphases in Nahuatl compared to English.

Having said all that, it is instructive to note that several common English words derive from Nahuatl - words like coyote, chocolate, avocado, tomato, and chipotle.  Remarkably, Nahuatl has been borrowed to a larger extent across many indigenous American languages, at least those of the American Southwest and Plains, in a very important way:  The canonical term for the portable dwelling used by many Native American tribes is tepee.  This is taken directly from the Nahuatl word tepe (where the second "e" is elongated), which means "mountain" - an apt description of the shape of a tepee.

There are two characteristics of this book that appeal to me especially, and these should be noted by anyone using this book to learn Nahuatl:

1 - The book treats the language almost formally; that is, it presents the language in much the same fashion as a reference text might describe a computer programming language.  As a mathematician and computer scientist, this appeals to me greatly; it makes sense, even while acknowledging that human language is very different from a programming language.  Since Nahuatl, like many American languages, is an agglutinating language (large words, especially verbs, are built from numerous prefixes and suffixes placed in fixed positions), this approach makes it easier to see how linguistic components such as location and direction, possession, etc. work within compound words.  This is invaluable in both encoding and decoding Nahuatl sentences.

2 - Launey includes a great many examples of Nahuatl in action, including idioms and turns of phrase.  What I found refreshing about this is that Launey doesn't simply toss out an idiom or slang term without providing the details of how this expression arose; the reader doesn't need to simply take his word for it, in other words.  I recall studying Hungarian some years ago.  A text I was using took the conversational approach to teaching the language, which is quite common.  In one sample conversation, a man drops his glasses and is looking for them, hoping that they aren't broken or damaged.  When he finds them undamaged, he says "De jo!", which is translated as "What luck!" or "Thank heavens!".  This isn't very helpful in learning Hungarian, since the expression translates literally to "But good!"  One is left to infer the meaning of both of the Hungarian words much later on.

With all of this, I can highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to appreciate and at least read Nahuatl literature, from the Classical period up to the present.  However, please keep the caveats mentioned above in mind, especially if one is accustomed to learning language aurally and/or via direct conversation instead of via building blocks.  Personally, I wish I had a Launey reference text for every language I've attempted to learn - I'd be a considerably more accomplished polyglot as a result.

Image credits / thanks: (top) Cover - (c) Cambridge University Press 2011 / (centre) Portrait of Michel Launey - thanks to La Manche Libre 6 December 2016 / (bottom) Portrait of Christopher Mackay - (c) “Epic Photography 2009. Creator - Jimmy Jeong, Credit - The Boston Globe”

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

1 April 2021

Hecatē / Ἑκάτη

Hecate

Helena / Ἑλένη

Helen

Psȳchē / Ψυχή

Psyche