Standardization

[John Schwaller]

Colleagues,

In the last few months I have been working on a book which focuses on the
month of Panquetzaliztli.  As part of this I have been looking at how the
month was celebrated in places other than Tenochtitlan and at times other
than the eve of the conquest.  In this research it has become clear to me,
and something repeated in our recent discussions, that at the time of the
arrival of the Spanish, there were many Nahuatls.  There were significant
differences between the Valley of Mexico and Tlaxcala, just to name one.
 In addition as Michael Swanton and Una Canger have discovered, immediately
after the conquest, and probably dating from before, there were many
varieties of Nahuatl as a second language, spoken by native speakers of
other languages who needed to operate in Nahuatl as well, both because of
Mexica and Spanish imperialism.

So, then as how, there were many Nahuatls.  Molina, Carochi, Sahagun, and
the rest merely distilled several variants into a stable form which we now
call Classical Nahuatl but which was a hybrid from its very inception.



-- 
John F. Schwaller
Professor,
University at Albany
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany NY 12222

jfschwaller at gmail.com
518-608-4522
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