Page:Myths of Mexico and Peru.djvu/74

 Language of the Nahua

The Nahua language represented a very low state of culture. Speech is the general measure of the standard of thought of a people, and if we judged the civilisation of the Nahua by theirs, we should be justified in concluding that they had not yet emerged from barbarism. But we must recollect that the Nahua of the conquest period had speedily adopted the older civilisation which they had found awaiting them on their entrance to Mexico, and had retained their own primitive tongue. The older and more cultured people who had preceded them probably spoke a more polished dialect of the same language, but its influence had evidently but little effect upon the rude Chichimecs and Aztecs. The Mexican tongue, like most American languages, belongs to the "incorporative" type, the genius of which is to unite all the related words in a sentence into one conglomerate term or word, merging the separate words of which it is composed one into another by altering their forms, and so welding them together as to express the whole in one word. It will be at once apparent that such a system was clumsy in the extreme, and led to the creation of words and names of the most barbarous appearance and sound. In a narrative of the Spanish discovery written by Chimalpahin, the native chronicler of Chalco, born in 1579, we have, for example, such a passage as the following: Oc chiucnauhxihuitl inik onen quilantimanca Espana camo niman ic yuh ca omacoc ihuelitiliztli ink niman ye chiuhcnauhxiuhtica, in oncan ohualla. This passage is chosen quite at random, and is an average specimen of literary Mexican of the sixteenth century. Its purport is, freely translated: "For nine years he [Columbus] remained in vain in Spain. Yea, for nine years there he waited for influence." The 42