10 questions about Nahuat-l and the Aztecs

[Joost Kremers]

a few comments about some of the ten questions asked earlier:

>> 5. Which dimensions are recognised in Nahuat-l or by the Aztecs? (we
>have 4: length, width, height and depth;
>
>Erh??? I see 3. In any one set-up, two of those four words for
>dimensions of space are synonyms.

indeed there are only three: imagine a cube: it is extended in three
spatial directions. modern physics has tought us that space should be
considered as the fourth dimension. from a physical point of view, space
and time are similar, but we, of course, _perceive_ them very differently.
and therefore we express them differently in language.

>> 6. How is space understood and described in Nahuat-l?

>> 7. As I am not a linguist but a sociologist/social psychiatrist ...
>Does this mean that they have a different understand of themselves in
>space and therefore a different spatial understanding?

these are actually interesting questions, but AFAIK the answer should be:
not very differently from us. linguists have found that languages employ
one of two ways to describe space. in most languages, including all
european languages, space is described relative to some salient object,
often the speaker. so you get such terms as 'in front of', 'behind', 'to
the left/right of', 'under' and 'above/over'.

in the other system, which is quite rare, space is described relative to
the earth. such systems speak in term of (e.g.) 'to the
north/south/west/east of'. this system creates some peculiar effects, such
as that speakers of these languages _always_ know to an extreme measure of
accuracy where the north is, no matter what time of day or night. (another
odd example is the footage i once saw of a man telling a story. they had
filmed him telling the same story on two different occasions. in one, he
was sitting facing north, in the other facing west. in the story there was
a boat that toppled over. he accompanied the words at this point with a
toppling-over motion of his hands. oddly enough, on the first occasion he
indicated the toppling-over from left to right, but on the other occasion,
when he was himself turned 90 degrees relative to the former position, he
made the toppling-over motion from back to front! he kept the imaginary
boat in the same postion relative to the earth. since he was himself in a
different position, he had to change the direction of his hand-gestures!)

but as far as i know, nahuatl has a spatial reference system similar to
ours: that is, relative to the speaker or a salient object.

note, by the way, that even though languages may use different methods to
talk about something, that does _not_ mean that the speakers of those
languages are forever condemned to see the world in a specific way: the
system of earth-relative spatial orientation is easily explained in
english, and is even _used_ in that language as a secondary system. please
do not make the mistake of Sapir who thought that because the Hopi indians
do not express tense in their language (which, if i'm not mistaken, was a
wrong assessment in itself...) they have no notion of time!

>> 9. Some linguistics (Charles William Johnson for example) detected the
>close similarity between the old Egyptian language and Nahuat-l ...

cf. the ever-popular Discovery Channel documentaries about this man (Bauval
his name was?) who finds indications all around the world for a lost
civilization, Atlantis, that he believes was located on Antarctica, before
the last ice-age. although he points out some fascinating questions, his
'theory' consists mostly of speculation upon speculation.

as for similarities between ancient egyptian an nahuatl: ancient egyptian
died out centuries before classical nahuatl as we know it developed. ergo:
there can be no links. furthermore, egyptian has a fundamentally different
structure from nahuatl, so again, it seems quite unlikely that any links
exist.

there may be similarities in writing systems, but these are accidental: a
case of two peoples stumbling upon the same solutions for the same
problems, independent of each other. again, the temporal dislocation
excludes any links.

well, my appologies for turning those few comments into a small lecture...

joost kremers


--------------------------------------------------------
Joost Kremers (Mr.)
University of Nijmegen - The Netherlands
Department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle-East
PO Box 9103
6500 HD Nijmegen - The Netherlands
phone: +31 24 3612996
fax: +31 24 3611972