QU: Nahuatl words -- accented in English?

[Paul Anderson]

Dear fellow listmembers,
I am currently having a discussion with the copy editor of my novel,
set, in part, in Mexico. The question is whether to accent names and
place names deriving from Nahuatl. I believe the accents are Spanish in
origin and serve to reproduce the stresses such words would normally
given by Nahuatl speakers. This could be an argument for not using them,
since they are not intrinsic but rather are foreign accretions. One
counter argument would be that the entire system of writing these words
in a Latin alphabet is an accretion.

Perhaps the stronger argument against using them in English is that they
do not guide English speakers, unless these speakers are familiar also
with the stress patterns of unaccented Spanish words.

It strikes me that one might choose to keep the accents on place names,
since they will be presented that way on modern maps and so forth. But
that for Quetzalcoatl, just for example, as with the word Nahuatl
itself, there is little justification for preserving the Spanish
accentuation.

Could anyone bring a little clarity to our muddle?
gratefully,
Paul Anderson

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