Would it be Itztlicelotl or Itztlocelotl, or something completely different? (Also for reference this is to help me change my name during my transition lol)

¡Hola a todos! 😊

Soy una ilustradora australiana y estoy trabajando en Mermaids of the World (Sirenas del Mundo), una colección de pines inspirados en culturas, tradiciones e historias de distintas partes del mundo.

Actualmente, la colección cuenta con 24 pines (en la imagen pueden ver algunos ejemplos) y estoy trabajando en 12 diseños nuevos, entre ellos uno inspirado en Chalchiuhtlicue, la deidad mexica asociada con el agua.

La ilustración está casi terminada, pero antes de finalizarla me encantaría recibir opiniones de personas con conocimientos sobre la cultura, la historia y las tradiciones nahuas.

Reconozco que Chalchiuhtlicue es una figura religiosa importante, no simplemente una sirena mitológica, y quiero abordar esta inspiración con el debido respeto.

Me interesa especialmente saber si los elementos visuales que he incorporado son apropiados y si existen diferencias importantes entre la iconografía histórica, las interpretaciones culturales contemporáneas y la creación artística que debería tener en cuenta.

También entiendo que las comunidades y tradiciones nahuas son diversas, y no quiero presentar una sola interpretación como representativa de todas ellas.

Estaría encantada de compartir la ilustración por mensaje privado con quienes estén interesados en revisarla.

También agradecería mucho cualquier recomendación de artistas o asesores culturales nahuas con quienes pudiera consultar.

¡Muchísimas gracias por su tiempo y por cualquier orientación que puedan ofrecer! 💕

Nimitzchicahua, imeme! Quenami incate?

I’m new to this thread (in the sense that I lurk but rarely post or comment), and I was wondering what the community here thinks about Mexicano, the current revitalization movement of it, and in general, lesser known/spoken Nahuatl dialects separate from the Huasteca variant.

Hello everyone, I was wondering what the best Nahuatl learning programs are? I could spend a few summer months abroad. My current problem is I currently speak only a little bit of Spanish. Are there any realistic options or should I shore up Spanish first before looking?

I see it used so often in the community, but I've also heard from Nahuatl teachers that it's being used completely wrong and doesn't mean what people think it means.

What does my reddit community here think?

Just for fun, here are some Classical Nahuatl Kahoot Quizzes (20 questions each)- feel free to use them to measure your own proficiency and also to see how you compare to other Reddit users:

Classical Nahuatl Easy

Classical Nahuatl Medium

Classical Nahuatl Hard

Most symbols were based on Mexica hieroglyphs, some.others on the Náhuatl Uniform Abugida, on the Latin alphabet, or on Hiragana

So far, I’ve counted 33 instances of long inīc—marked with a macron—in a facsimile of Carochi’s grammar.

This isn’t just a printing error. Long inīc appears in purpose, manner, means, cause, consequence, content, degree, and temporal constructions.

An originally long relational form, subject to frequent secondary shortening, is more likely than an originally invariant short vowel.

For normalized analysis, īk / in īk is a defensible representation.

I understand īk as a generalized oblique relator: “with X as the relevant anchor or circumstance.”

More idiomatically: “by, through, by means of, or along the relation supplied by X.”

Īk / in īk can relate an event to its:

instrument
manner
path
source
cause
result
purpose
respect or capacity
degree
rank
time
preceding discourse event

The substantial semantic overlap with īka has led scholars such as Lockhart, Launey, Karttunen, and Andrews to propose a connection between the two.

If that connection is real, Tetelcingo’s retention of an initial long ī in īca may provide circumstantial evidence for a historically long īk / in īk.

At the same time, īk may have become increasingly grammaticalized and begun losing its vowel length over time.

Hello, I was hoping to get a proper translation from English to Nahuatl. I was hoping to translate or get the closest translation to "Snake fang" to Nahuatl this would be for a name of a knife. I don't know the grammar or diacritics (I hope that's the right word) for Nahuatl. Such as what word would be first, would there be a space between the two or would they be one word etc. I tried looking around through Google but I don't entirely trust lots of what I saw and the reliable stuff was the translation of the individual words not together.

Camilla Townsend said in her recent AMA that lack of Nahuatl fluency is the greatest problem in the field right now.

That includes plenty of your favorite scholars. They just don’t know the language.

We would never accept Assyriologists who couldn’t read cuneiform. Why do we accept Mesoamericanists with pitiful Nahuatl?

Sometimes they never really learned the language. Sometimes they just repeat León-Portilla’s mistakes from sixty years ago.

In the new Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, vol. 72, Raúl Macuil Martínez repeats an old mistake about tonaca-.

A los cerros que eran considerados como grandes contenedores de maíz como el Popocatepetl se les llamaba tonacatepetl (“nuestro cerro de los alimentos”).

Maarten Jansen did the same thing in vol. 67:

. . . “nuestro mantenimiento” (como en el nombre del dios primordial Tonacatecuhtli, “Señor de Nuestro Sustento”) . . .

Neither Tonacatecuhtli nor Tonacatepetl can be read as possessed nouns. They still have the absolutive ending! Their to- is not “our.”

This is also what happens when people refuse to write vowel length. Write it and the mistake becomes obvious:

• Tonacatepēuh: “Our meat-mountain.”
• Tōnacātepētl: “Sun-warmed mountain.”

This isn’t some obscure point. Possessed nouns drop the absolutive suffix. Basic Nahuatl.

J. Richard Andrews was already calling out this exact mistranslation in 2002:

Incidentally, the [noun] Tōnacātepētl is frequently mistranslated as “Hill of Our Sustenance” (as if the tō were the possessor pronoun to-, “our,” when in fact it is part of the verbstem tōna, “for the sun to shine,” and as if the subject pronoun’s number subposition were not filled by the absolutive-state tl.

Twenty-four years later, scholars are still making the same mistake.

Someone needs to send out a memo: Dust off the grammar textbooks, read the corresponding sections on the -cā- (de)verbal morpheme, and learn the language before publishing on it.

John Sullivan recently explained why he chose not to mark vowel length in the examples of the IDIEZ Nahuatl dictionary:

“All speakers know which vowels are long; they have simply never considered it important to represent them in writing. Remember, the purpose of a writing system is not to reproduce pronunciation, but to trigger the image of a word in the mind of the speaker.”

This sparked some discussion in our Nahuatl Discord server and made me reflect on why I should—or shouldn’t—mark long vowels in my own transcriptions and translations.

I think I’ve come up with a good reason.

Most people online are not living in monolingual Nahuatl-speaking communities surrounded by L1 speakers who consistently and accurately pronounce the language every day.

Even young people from those communities who, for socioeconomic reasons, have had to move to Spanish or English-centric environments, might not have 24/7 access to textual or audio input in their native language.

And for most learners online, there is currently no other way to acquire this important feature of the language unless it’s built into the texts they read.

I once encountered a similar argument in the Latin learning community:

“Vowel length is an important part of Latin, especially in poetry. Notice that I’m talking about vowel length, not macrons. Macrons are simply one way of marking vowel length in dictionaries and teaching materials. You’re free not to write them—and probably shouldn’t if you’re writing for others to read. They are a later convention used to project a ‘perfect’ reconstructed pronunciation onto the text because modern learners value that accuracy. For many speakers in the past, they would have been somewhat superfluous.”

I think this is what John Sullivan was talking about. Native speakers do not write long vowels—not because vowel length is unimportant, but because they do not need written reminders of distinctions they already know intuitively.

I, however, don’t live surrounded by accurate L1 speech. As a result, my ability to “hear” vowel length through the medium of text is closely tied to the use of macrons.

Ideally, reading should complement a rich listening environment. But for many of us learning Nahuatl today, reading constitutes 99% of the experience! Because the audio landscape is so underfunded.

In practice, the only organizations consistently investing in audiovisual materials featuring native Nahuatl speech are evangelical Christian organizations!

Until that changes, perhaps making a concerted effort to indicate, as much as possible, vowel lengths (which do change the meaning of words!) is the right way to approach the language from the outside.

Hey im a college student in the US. I am taking a course about poetry outside of english, through this course I am hoping to translate some contemporary poetry from nahuatl to english. I have my hands on some dictionaries but I feel that they don't contain the right information to translate poetry and they are lacking a lot of vocabulary. Do you guys have any resources or have any way to access the language. I want to do this poetry justice. I have a culture ties to Nahua and this is my way to connect with my culture.

Hola, soy estudiante universitario en Estados Unidos. Estoy cursando una asignatura sobre poesía no escrita originalmente en inglés y, a través de ella, espero traducir algo de poesía contemporánea del náhuatl al inglés. Tengo algunos diccionarios a mano, pero siento que no contienen la información adecuada para traducir poesía y que carecen de mucho vocabulario. ¿Conocen algún recurso o alguna forma de acceder al idioma? Quiero hacerle justicia a esta poesía; tengo vínculos culturales con el pueblo nahua y esta es mi manera de conectar con mi cultura.

Holi! Soy una chica de 22 años de San Luis Potosí, y por desgracia no he encontrado profesores en mi estado, así que opté por preguntar aquí.

¿Hay alguien que tenga cursos en linea o presenciales?

Agradecería si alguien puede compartirme su información y costos.

______

Hi! I'm a 22 year old girl from San Luis Potosí, and unfortunately, I haven't found any teachers in my state, so I decided to ask here.

Does anyone offer online or in-person courses?

I would appreciate it if someone could share their information and costs with me.

I want to add a Nahuatl phrase to the image and GPT suggested

CHIKAWALISTLI

Just want to make sure it is appropriate with the image for “strength/vigor/power”

Lo que dice el título, es para nombrar una historia ^^

Hueyatl iacueyouh comonih /

In ehecatl momalacachoa cuauhtlan /

Yoalilhuicatotonac quimanahuia in tlein tlatlatilo /

Mictlāntletl tlahueltlatla yōllohtlan popcatepētl /

Tlatecuh huel mopicoloā

I request aid with translation of items to use for naming items, weapons, animals and stuff in a novel

I made this cover of "Truce" by 21 Pilots in the central variant (nhn). meow

This is Machiyotl, a script proposal created by u/t0natiu and further developed by u/PhysicsE. Its symbols drew inspiration from glyphs actually used in Mesoamerican codices and related language traditions, including Maya writing.

This introduction video is entirely in Nahuatl, but features subtitles for those who are still learning.

If you’d like to learn more about the script or Nahuatl in general, the makers have a Discord you can sign up for here: https://discord.gg/KhWGnWzMp.

Hola alguien puede traducirme esto del maya k'iche

Kintzalij b’i pa ri ulew kinel chi lo jun mul chi uwach ulew

por favor

Hi Reddit!

I recently got married and I took my husband’s last name, which is a Nahuatl last name. We both only speak Spanish. I work in education and very often I run into people (fellow staff, students, parents, etc) who ask me how to pronounce it.

I use my husband’s pronunciation of the name but I want to make sure I say it authentically and correctly. And I want to help those who want to say it properly, too. I am wondering if there is a service where I can reach out to a native speaker for an audio recording of how to say it. I would like to put it in my email signature so folks who want to say my name “the right way” can listen to it a few times :)!

Thank you all very much 🫶！