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Lesson 1: Pronunciation

Classical Nahuatl pronunciation is relatively simple and follows the spelling closely. There are four complications for English speakers:

1. Spelling has not been stable over time, so the spelling you see may not be the spelling you need when you look something up in a dictionary.
2. Most spelling systems are based on Spanish, not English, usage.
3. We are not used to distinguishing long and short vowels.
4. We are not used to treating TL and KW as single consonants.

On this page, capital letters are used to refer to sound and lower case letters to spelling.

Sounds

Vowels are a, e, i, and o, and may be long or short. (There is no vowel corresponding to u. When you see the letter u used as though it were a vowel, it stands for the sound O or W.)

Long and short vowels differ in pronunciation mostly in how long one keeps the vowel going. This mattered a lot to the speakers of Classical Nahuatl, who listened for this distinction, but it was difficult for the Spanish to hear, and they rarely recorded it. Modern reconstructions do not all agree in detail about vowel length. Perhaps under the influence of Spanish, vowel length distinctions do not seem to occur in modern Nahuatl. A partial exception is long o, which tended to sound a bit like u.

In this text a long vowel is indicated by writing it with a diaresis (umlaut) over it: ë, ä. It is more usual to indicate a long vowel by a macron (“long mark”) over the vowel or by two dots after the vowel: xāco = xäco = xa:co.

Some suffixes lengthen the previous vowel. In those cases I have used a colon as the first letter of the suffix when it is listed separately. When two or more identical vowels come together they form a long vowel. If one (or more) of them is already long vowel, the result is still only one long vowel: ï + ïxpan = ïxpan.

Stress is on the second syllable from the end except when addressing a man by name (the "masculine vocative"). (Today these cases are usually marked with the accent mark ´ as a reminder that the stress is unusual, as in Spanish.)

Spelling

Most letters are used more or less as in English, Spanish, or other languages you may know. (Click here for vaguely geeky linguistic note.) Here are a few special points to remember:

• The written letters s, w, and k are not normally used, even though Nahuatl has the corresponding sounds. (Some writers use them for some dialects of modern Nahuatl.) Instead each of these sounds is spelled in more than one way depending on the context. (See table.) In these notes I sometimes use the letters S, W, or K as a shorthand way of referring to the collection of ways of spelling the sound in question. (Thus K stands for c or qu depending on context, for example.)
• ll is merely a long L. It is not a Y-like sound as in Spanish.
• tl counts as a single consonant in Nahuatl. It was pronounced by pronouncing the T and the L simultaneously. In some modern dialects (and probably some ancient ones), it has evolved into a simple T or a simple L, although still usually spelled tl.
• The sound KW counts as a single consonant in Nahuatl. It is pronounced the way it looks (like the qu in English quack or quill), but it can occur not only at the beginning but just as easily at the end of a syllable, where it has no analog in English: KWAKW. Note that (confusingly) it is spelled CU at the beginning of a syllable, UC at the end. (UC is sometimes spelled CUH.) cuacua = KWAKWA, cuauc = KWAKW.
• The sound W is spelled hu at the beginning of a syllable, uh at the end. cahua = KAWA, cauh = KAW
• The spelling ch is as in English and counts as a single consonant. (The combination can occur in spelling without producing the CH sound if one syllable happens to end in C and the next begins with H. This is quite rare. When it occurs, it is convenient to separate the C and H with an apostrophe, although this is not usually done.)
• The letter h, when it is not written beside u, is like the H sound in English in many modern dialects, and probably some ancient ones. (And if often turns into Spanish j when borrowed into modern Mexican words.) Apparently in most dialects of Classical Nahuatl the sound was actually pronounced as a glottal stop. Since the Spanish, like English speakers, often had difficulty hearing the stop, they tended not to write it, despite its crucial importance in many sentences. For purposes of studying Classical Nahuatl, I strongly recommend pronouncing it like English h.

Study the following table:

Pronunciation Examples:

Mutations

• N before P or M tends to become M, while M before any other consonant or at the end of a word tends to become N.
• Y turns to X when it falls at the end of a word.
• TZ and CH sometimes alternate in certain contexts.

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