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Updated: June 17, 2025
It is quite evident from the above extracts that in the translation of the ancient songs in the present volume we must be prepared for serious difficulties, the more so as the Nahuatl language, in the opinion of some who are the best acquainted with it, lends itself with peculiar facility to ambiguities of expression and obscure figures of speech.
This assigns beyond doubt the song in question to the first half of the sixteenth century, and we may therefore take its phraseology as a type of the Nahuatl poetry shortly after the Conquest. It is also stated to be a native composition, and from its contents, it was clearly composed by one of the converts to the Christian faith.
She was the mythical mother of the human race, and dispensed afflictions and adverse fortune. See Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, Lib. I, cap. 6. The name is a proof of the antiquity of the poem, which is throughout in the spirit of the ancient religion. It admirably illustrates the poetic flexibility of the Nahuatl.
It is important, therefore, to state the exact provenance of the specimens printed in this volume, many of which I consider to have been composed previous to the Conquest, and written down shortly after the Nahuatl language had been reduced to the Spanish alphabet.
In English, for instance, such compounded elements as red in redcoat or over in overlook merely modify the significance of the dominant coat or look without in any way sharing, as such, in the predication that is expressed by the sentence. Some languages, however, such as Iroquois and Nahuatl, employ the method of composition for much heavier work than this.
One of the chapters in this Latin Essay is entitled De Indorum Poetarum Canticis sive Prosodiis, in which he introduces Ixtlilxochitl's translation and also a song in the original Nahuatl, but the latter is doubtless of late date and unimportant as a really native production.
In fact, the description in verse 7 applies to Tenochtitlan rather than the singer's own town. But the text does not admit this translation. 10. petiatolini, I have derived from petlatl, suspecting an error in transcription. The reference is to the rushes in the mat on which the singer stood. The ordinary sad burden of the Nahuatl poets is repeated with emphasis in this plaint.
Copper bells are said to be used in the secret ceremonials of the modern Tusayan villages, and in certain of the ceremonial foot races metal bells of great age and antique pattern are sometimes tied about the waists of the runners. Small copper hawk bells, found in southern Arizonian ruins, are identical in form and make with those used by the ancient Nahuatl people.
The term for these relationships, in the Nahuatl tongue, and used among all the tribes speaking it was 'calpulli. It is also used to designate a great hall or house and we may therefore infer that, originally at least, all the members of one kinship dwelt under one common roof. But nowhere is it stated that the tribal government or authority assigned locations to any of its fractions.
In support of his view of what is meant by the traditions, he adds this philological argument: “The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. They are not Greek, and can not be referred to any known language of the Old World. But in the Nahuatl language we find immediately the radical a, atl, which signifies water, war, and the top of the head.
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