tlahtoa / saltillo

[Galen Brokaw]

At the risk of extending this discussion beyond y'all's patience, I just
wanted to make a comment.
I tend to forget sometimes that Classical Nahuatl as we know it through
grammars and dictionaries probably gives us a false sense of linguistic
homogeneity at the time of the conquest. It seems more likely that there were
many dialects at the time of the conquest just like there are today and that
any given grammar recorded only one of those dialects. So, there may have been
dialects in the sixteenth-century that did not have the glottal stop as a
phoneme and others that used it in different ways. So, I guess it is difficult
to talk about a phonetic evolution from Classical with regard to all dialects
because we don't know what the characteristics of all dialects were in the
sixteenth century.
Galen