Grammar of the Mexican Language: With an Explanation of its Adverbs (1645) 9780804766050

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Grammar of the Mexican Language

Nahuatl Studies Series Number 7

Series Editor James Lockhart Associate Series Editor Rebecca Hom

UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89

GRAMMAR OF

THE MEXICAN LANGUAGE WITH AN EXPLANATION OF ITS ADVERBS (1645) By

Horacia Carochi, S. J.

translated and edited with commentary by

James Lockhart

Stanford University Press UCLA Latin American Center Publications

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carochi, Horacio. [Cornpendio del arte de Ia lengua rnexicana. English] Grammar of the Mexican language: with an explanation of its adverbs ( 1645) I by Horacio Carochi ; translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart. p. ern. - {Nahuatl studies series ; no. 7) "In this edition the original, with its Spanish and Nahuatl, faces an English translation of the Spanish and a second version of the Nahuatl examples"-Pref. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-8047-4281-2 {alk. paper) I. Nahuatl language-Grammar. 2. Nahuatl language-Adverb. I. Lockhart, James. II. Title. III. Nahuatl series ; no. 7. PM4063 .C313 2001 497'.45282421--dc21 2001032286 Original Printing 200 I Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

Contents Abbreviations

vi

Editor's Preface

vii

Transcription and Translation of the Grammar Original Front Matter

2

First Book, of Nouns, Pronouns, and Prepositions

18

Second Book, of Verbs and Conjugations

94

Third Book, of the Derivation of Nouns and Verbs

174

Fourth Book, of the Compounding of Nouns, Verbs, and Other Things

282

Fifth Book, of the Adverbs and Conjunctions of the Mexican Language

328

Index of the Books, Chapters, and Paragraphs'

478

Index of the General Rules of the Syllable

490

Bibliography

494

Analytical Index

496

1See

this index for an accounting of the chapters and subsections. - v-

Abbreviations Andrews ANS

CH DK FC

Molina SG

TC WPH

Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, by J. Richard Andrews. The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues, ed. by Karttunen and Lockhart. Die Relationen Chimalpahin's, ed. by Zimmermann. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, by Karttunen. Florentine Codex of Sahagun and aides (1979 facsimile edition). Vocabulario castellano y mexicano y mexicano y castellano, by fray Alonso de Molina. The Story of Guadalupe, by Laso de la Vega, ed. by Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart. The Testaments of Culhuacan, ed. by Cline and Leon-Portilla. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, ed. by Lockhart.

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Editor's Preface DURING MUCH OF my life I have passed for a historian, so let me begin

to explain this edition of Horacia Carochi's 1645 Arte de la lengua mexicana by a narration of how I became involved in the enterprise and what steps it has passed through on the way to its present state. As I was beginning to study older Nahuatl seriously, already trying to translate some documents, I turned to the late Arthur J. 0. Anderson for help-in 1973 I believe it was. In sessions at his home in San Diego I discovered among other things that the Carochi grammar, unknown to me until then except in bibliographies, was Arthur's bible. His copy of the 1892 Mexican edition, which had once belonged to the English consul in Mexico City, was always at his side, and he had covered it with annotations in his fine calligraphy. Seeing how frequently Arthur consulted it, I thought I must have it, and he was good enough to make a photocopy for me. Being acquainted with Carochi, and after considerable effort understanding him reasonably well, put me on an entirely different plane in my efforts to deal with Nahuatl texts. By 1976 I was even starting to teach others, my own graduate students in history at UCLA being the primary sufferers. Arthur's copy of Carochi, now twice or thrice photocopied, was to be our principal text, alternating with the direct study of documents. But it soon became clear that few people were enough at home with seventeenth-century Spanish or with Latinate grammatical terms to profit as they might have. Add to this that the very first chapters of Carochi, about orthography, "accents," and noun "declensions," are the most obscure and outdated in the entire book (in reality they are the only parts that could justly be called obscure or outdated at all). To cap things off, although its fine, complex, copious Nahuatl examples are the jewel of Carochi's work, the distance between them and Carochi's equally fine translations of them was such that students could often hardly discover any relation between the two. It soon occurred to me that an English translation with a large quotient of commentary was what was called for. In the process I might come to grasp Carochi's materials and teachings better myself, for many unique, profound, transcendent points are touched on only in passing or by implication. I would also have the opportunity to commune with someone I have felt since my first exposure to his work to be a kindred spirit. In the later 1970's, almost as recreation and change of pace, I spent a good deal of my spare time translating Carochi and composing any number of comments and explanations. I wrote by hand, in pencil, on a set of sheets - Vll -

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

that soon became rather shopworn from being carried about here and there and having things spilled on them. Often I worked at the end of the day, on a couch and in front of the television. At that point I was thinking of an English edition only, and I carefully reproduced the original form of the Nahuatl examples, especially the priceless diacritics. In this way, over the years into the early 1980's a goodly corpus took shape, a thick pad of paper with much-erased but clear and neat material accounting for somewhere between a third and a half of the entire grammar. As the 80's progressed I became so absorbed in other projects that the work on Carochi flagged. Sometime late in that decade I was momentarily inspired to resume, only to find my materials missing. A determined search turned up nothing. Consoling myself that I had learned a great deal anyway, I went back to my other enterprises. Then in 1994, after a move to a new residence during which every scrap of my papers had to be sifted, the things showed up after all, in two separate chunks. It seemed like a nudge from fate. I was by now equipped with a computer which made matters vastly easier, and I went happily back to work, by spurts, where I had left off. I was no longer, however, entirely satisfied with the previous framework of the undertaking. Quite a long time before, I had become acquainted with the original printed form of the grammar (through a photocopy acquired for me by Ida Altman from the Library of Congress) and had come to realize two relevant facts: first, the original is very hard indeed to read, and second, the 1892 edition contains a good sprinkling of errors. Another element in the picture was the creation of Frances Karttunen' s Nahuatl dictionary, 1 with emphasis on the representation of vowel quantity and glottal stop, a work in which I was, during its early stages, almost an unofficial collaborator. Karttunen' s most important single source was Carochi's grammar, for with his elaborate diacritics he had gone to more trouble to represent vowel length and glottal stop than any one else in the postcontact centuries and remains the primary authority on these matters for the older language. Through Karttunen's work it became clear that Carochi's diacritics are not really reliable in any given instance. By an absolute standard he had proceeded quite haphazardly, taking many well known long vowels for granted, falling far short of full, consistent notation in any department, and committing (or having committed for him by the printer) a certain number of simple errors. Only the systematic compilation and analysis of the whole corpus yields reliable results. In other words, although 1An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 1983. Hereafter referred to as OK. The work was in gestation for five or six years before its first appearance.

HISTORY OF THE EDITION. VALUE OF CAROCHI

-IX-

exact reproduction of Carochi's diacritics in legible form has value for advanced scholars working on Nahuatl phonology, it is a trap for students who hope to learn something about vowel length and the glottal stop. Things now began to point toward a bilingual edition. The Spanish could retain the original diacritics and spacing of the Nahuatl examples, the English could give the examples in a rationalized form. It would also be worthwhile to reproduce the Spanish itself, considering that the legible 1892 edition contains errors, while the original (and any facsimile) 2 is so hard to read as to hamper study of it seriously. 3 Moreover, it is useful to have the Spanish and the English facing so that readers of the Spanish will have at least one person's opinion of what any puzzling passage might mean. By the summer of 1998 the work on the bilingual edition was provisionally done, but I still did not proceed directly toward publication. Surveying the results, I felt that much had been achieved, but that my original intention, to give students the best possible introduction to the Nahuatl language as it appears in older texts (the only written texts there are) had still not been achieved. Even made legible, translated, and explained, Carochi is not for beginners. Something transitional was needed. I thus halted work on Carochi for the moment and wrote up some Nahuatl lessons I had evolved over the years. The book, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts, is to appear simultaneously with this edition of Carochi; my hope is that students can proceed directly from the former to the latter and between the two have all they need to deal successfully with the corpus of Nahuatl writing, of whose true extent we learn more every year.

The value of Carochi HORACIO CAROCHI' S Arte is beyond comparison the most influential grammar of Nahuatl ever published. But aside from that, it continues to be one of the most enlightening works in existence for all who would understand Nahuatl, whether they be relative beginners or experts, whether more interested in the older or the newer forms of the language. Carochi stands out starkly from his predecessors. It is sometimes said that he relied greatly Carochi, Arte de Ia lengua mexicana, facsimile edition with introduction by Miguel Leon-Portilla, 1983. 3Qnly belatedly have I become aware of a transcription of Carochi available online, prepared by Una Canger. At this writing I have not seen it, though in view of the nature of her work in general I am sure that it is of high quality. 2See

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

on the earlier Jesuit Antonio del Rincon, to whom he occasionally refers. A comparison will show that he took a good deal of his outline and some of his examples from Rincon, as well as most of the infamous list of words of different meaning which differ externally only in vowel quantity or glottal stop-the thing in my view is little more than a distraction-but that Rincon is, held up against Carochi, childishly unanalytical, opaque, and slight. Later grammars by Spanish ecclesiastics largely amount to unsuccessful attempts to create digests of Carochi' s work. Nevertheless, when Nahuatl scholarship revived in the twentieth century, gaining much momentum in the 1940's to 60's, especially in Mexico, not everyone gave Carochi the preeminence he deserves. Surely Angel Maria Garibay, the leader of the movement, did not, purporting to see Carochi only as one among many. 1 Then in 1975 with J. Richard Andrews and in 1979 with Michel Launey there appeared two modem grammars which rest on a deep study of Carochi and make his insights available, rationalizing them and clothing them in terminology of our time. 2 From that point forward translations from older Nahuatl texts have been much more precise and realistic than had been the case. In large part the great widening of the corpus was responsible, with the opening up of mundane Nahuatl documentation around that time, but the full appreciation of Carochi, i.e., of the grammar ofthe language in a deeper sense, was equally important. With the new more sophisticated grammars available, Carochi might seem to be less indispensable than before. In some aspects the field has now at last, after more than three centuries, gone beyond him-attaining a systematic grasp of the fact that Nahuatl's nouns are like its verbs in having obligatory subject prefixes so that they represent equative statements in themselves; properly classifying the language's morphological nightmare, the preterits of verbs (and thereby recognizing the verb classes definitively); 3 integrating phonology and morphology; 4 and beginning to explore some of

Llave del nahuatl, 3rd. ed. (1970), has the following to say about Carochi on p. 121, in a list of grammars: "muy uti!, bastante completa, aunque en algunos puntas discutible." Olmos and even Rincon come off rather better. 2J. Richard Andrews, Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, 1975 (hereafter just Andrews); Michel Launey, Introduction ala langue eta Ia litterature azteques, vol. 1: Grammaire, 1979. 3These insights were first made public by Andrews in his 1975 grammar. Launey, Una Canger, and some others were carrying out similar analysis at the same time independently. 4 Andrews achieved much here, but the fullest expression is Karttunen's 1Garibay's

VALUE OF CAROCHI

-XI-

the subtleties of syntax. 5 Yet these accomplishments rest in large part on Carochi once more; we have made explicit or recast regularities he in some way grasped but never quite managed to formulate. I have little doubt that the germ of further advances can be found in his work. To this day nothing has been done approaching Carochi's treatment of "adverbs" (all manner of particles and more or less adverbial expressions), without which one is lost in attempting to deal with larger strings of Nahuatl. At bottom this section, which Carochi rightly deemed important enough to be included in the title of the book, is a large set of well chosen examples with just enough explanation and analysis to hold them together. It is here that we see most clearly what is actually true of the work as a whole, that it is valuable not only for its grammatical analysis, but for its multitude of authentic examples with characteristic vocabulary and idiom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They represent a large corpus in themselves, some from ecclesiastical texts which may have disappeared, others unique colloquial expressions out of Carochi's own experience that have no occasion to be duplicated in the existing documentation, even the more mundane parts of it. Above all they have what extant similar material doesn't, a reliable, sensitive gloss by Carochi as both an incomparable expert and a contemporary. The examples are essentially classic Stage 2 Nahuatl, that is, characteristic of the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, when Nahuatl had absorbed a great deal of Spanish vocabulary but was not yet accepting verbs and prepositions. 6 Once we have entirely absorbed it, we may be able to do without Carochi's analysis, but we will never be able to do without his examples and the information on idiom, syntax, and phonology embedded in them. 7 dictionary (DK). 5Greater attention to and sophistication about syntax is a general characteristic of recent Nahuatl grammarians and philologists. Perhaps the most explicit treatment is in my Nahuatl as Written, chapters 10, 14, and 16. 6The grammar came out at a time when Stage 3 (see p. xx) had begun, but Carochi has filtered out the more blatant and recent Spanish contact phenomena. No Joan verbs appear. In any case, many of his examples came from older texts, and the 1645 publication is the result of decades of work, so that despite the year of its appearance it is naturally a Stage 2 product. 7 I will not attempt here a systematic analysis of Carochi's sources because an exhaustive search of the corpus of ecclesiastical Nahuatl, published and unpublished, is a prerequisite, and I have carried out no such search (nor, at this writing, has anyone else). Carochi makes some use of the Bancroft Dialogues, the extant copy of which was produced in his circle (see [cont'd]

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

The transcription of the original IN THIS EDITION the original, with its Spanish and Nahuatl, faces an English translation of the Spanish and a second version of the Nahuatl examples. Both the Spanish and the Nahuatl examples on the Spanish side retain the original spelling, the original punctuation and diacritics or lack thereof, and the original spacing of letters (which in the examples is quite close to the way we would do it today, but leaning a bit toward the practice of the time, integrating particles or any short word with following nuclear words, sometimes dividing a nuclear complex). Even the typographical arrangement here, though not following the original exactly, is closely modeled on it. Actual outright errors of letters in the original are corrected on the Spanish Karttunen and Lockhart, The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues, 1987, hereafter ANS. Examples of quotes by Carochi are on pp. 206-07 and 408-09 below.). At least twice he quotes passages closely related to Book Six of the Florentine Codex (pp. 436-37, 458-59). He seems to have combed through a large number of sermon collections and confessionals, but at the same time he kept coming back to certain specific materials. Miguel Leon-Portilla (introduction to Carochi 1983, p. xxxiii) refers to an ecclesiastical manuscript containing some passages about people who spent centuries in the other world before returning to this life; Carochi uses it several times. He may have known the two great collections of Nahuatl song that have come down to us, but though his sample of ultracomplex compounds (pp. 286-87) in the style of the songs contains some items which can be traced to a specific ultimate origin (Leon-Portilla, Joe. cit., pp. xxviii-xxix), Carochi took this set of passages wholesale from his predecessor Rincon. He uses some other examples from Rincon as well. A thorough comparison might be revealing. Also, Rincon in all likelihood had a collection of materials which passed on to Carochi and became the core of his own, expanded in his decades of work over the first half of the seventeenth century. The most frequently quoted written source, used again and again in Book Five, is a Nahuatl account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico that bears a close affinity to Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex (see especially pp. 374-75 and 420-25 below). Rarely, however, is a Carochi version identical to what is found in Book Twelve as we know it. I think the passages are probably taken from Sahagun's 1585 revision of Book Twelve, the Nahuatl of which has been lost (see Sahagun 1989, ed. by Cline). No less important than the sentences from written sources are those Carochi takes from his direct experience with Nahuas. Reflecting his own activities, many of these passages smack of the confessional and church attendance; others come out of his contact with members of the indigenous

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE ORIGINAL

- xiii -

side, but the errors are reproduced in footnotes. The original list of errata at the back of the book has been omitted, and all of its corrections have been silently carried out. Unmarked features in the Nahuatl examples or wrong or dubious diacritics, even when they are obviously typographical errors, bear no specific note or indication; my opinion of the intention can be gathered from the rendition of the Nahuatl text on the English side. On the Spanish side I have sometimes, following the custom of the time, changed u to V when it becomes upper case, or V to u when it appears in lower case. In one respect the Spanish side in the present edition deviates from the original. The printed book of 1645 uses an acute accent, ',to indicate a short vowel. A great deal of experience has shown that even expert readers are constantly confusing this diacritic with the grave accent, ', used in the original to represent a glottal stop after a vowel. The problem arises not only because of the similarity of the two signs but above all because of the rarity of the meaning assigned to the acute accent, which to my knowledge is nowhere else seen with this significance. I have replaced the acute accent with the breve, w' which is well known in this function, and indeed is used instead of the acute in the extant handwritten version of the Bancroft Dialogues, produced in Carochi's circle and perhaps under his direction. 1 At one point Carochi says, clearly well before the book reached the printer, that he is not sure that it will be possible to produce all the diacritics properly in a printed book for lack of enough characters.2 I consider it very likely that the troublesome acute in the Arte is the result of an insufficient supply of breves in the printer's repertoire, and that Carochi' s true intention has been restored. In any case, every instance of win a Nahuatl example on the Spanish side here corresponds to an instance of ' in the original book. The original's folio notation is retained in brackets in the main Spanish text (and also in the translation) so that references in terms of the original can be located. The original speaks of p. 1 and p. 2 of a folio, but to avoid town council (probably in Tepotzotlan primarily) and with aides in his scholarly and other work; yet other passages are from Nahua family and work life, which Carochi somehow had opportunity to observe. He is particularly good at catching the caustic humor of much everyday Nahuatl discourse. Carochi shows no signs of having known the largest corpus of Nahuatl writing, the mundane secular documents produced in their thousands by Nahua notaries outside the framework of ecclesiastical supervision. 1See ANS, pp. 2-6, 69-71, 74. 2Transcription and translation below, pp. 24-25.

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

confusions with the pagination of this volume, the more usual system of recto and verso has been adopted: "f. 5" indicates folio 5 recto; "f. 5v" indicates folio 5 verso. Both the pagination of this volume and the foliation of the original are indicated in the original index of chapters or table of contents. The English translation

THE ENGLISH translation provided here is meant primarily for students, but it does serve some other functions. Translation forces us to test our understanding. Those with facility in Spanish sometimes glide over Carochi's prose more than read it; I have certainly been guilty of doing so at times, and I came to grasp the real intention of certain passages only when I had to translate them. Between his seventeenth-century vocabulary and his special grammatical terminology, Carochi uses quite a few expressions not transparent to some modem Spanish speakers. (I have detected nothing Italianate about his Spanish.) An important facet of the translation is the form in which it represents Carochi's Nahuatl examples. In the original, few diacritics are in themselves erroneous, but none of the markings are consistent. Carochi indicates short vowels only exceptionally, mainly when he wants to focus on vowel quantity in an example he is discussing, or when a short vowel would not have been expected, and also in certain spurts where no particular motivation on his part can be detected. The macron for a long vowel is omitted quite often too, above all on frequent items, but also on others. The markings for glottal stop are carried out with a very reasonable degree of consistency. In the Nahuatl examples as they appear in the English translation here, diacritics are regularized. All glottal stops and the quantity of all vowels are indicated. The breve or its equivalent is omitted altogether, since a vowel is either short or long, and only one sign is needed; moreover, a short vowel is actually just a normal vowel, and a long one is one that is lengthened in compensation for the loss of following segments. Only long vowels, then, are specially marked, with the same macron as in Carochi, but consistently. The indication of vowel quantity is essentially merely a rationalization of Carochi' s own usage. 1 I follow Carochi in such matters as giving a short i in the tzin reverential although there is no doubt that the i is historically long and is still long in some varieties of Nahuatl today. In Carochi's time 'This has already been done in DK, so the markings will nearly always agree with the ones there. When they deviate, a note often gives an explanation.

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE ORIGINAL. ENGLISH TRANSLATION

-XV-

and place it may have been short in final position after the loss or virtual loss of n. I follow Carochi in not showing word-final long vowels since by all indications they were not pronounced, except in some instances where a long vowel originally penultimate in a noun root ends up final, as in niixcii, my property. Carochi puts the long vowel himself in many of these cases and specifically describes the phenomenon. I also put macrons on final long vowels of particles, which are nearly always in the front part of a nuclear complex and retain their length; I do this even when the word is cited independently. I do the same with adverbial particles that were originally preterit agentives, like iciuhcii, matcii, etc. Carochi maintains that before passive suffixes the last vowel of the stem of a Class 3 verb is short or long depending on whether or not the previous vowel is long or, alternatively, the last vowel is preceded by two consonants. That may be, but it fails to work out consistently in Carochi's notation, the Bancroft Dialogues, or any other source. I take it that the vowel in question is historically long, as in related stems, and I so produce it. I make this vowel short before the lia applicative and the ltia causative; I write an i of this type long before the tia causative unless Carochi specifically indicates differently. Actually, the visual difference between an unmarked and a long i in the original is often negligible, and in some cases one must make up one's mind quite arbitrarily. It had been my intention to rationalize Carochi' s use of the markings for glottal stop, but in the end I have not done so, because of uncertainty about the exact intention of the circumflex n that is used in addition to the usual grave('). One gets the impression that Carochi means the former for glottal stop at the end of a complete statement. Nevertheless, the grave is seen at the end of the first of two entirely independent sentences, and also before auh, which is almost the same thing. Thus the circumflex would seem to be for the actual end of a speech, before a long silence or a change of speaker. Yet at other times Carochi talks as though the circumflex is merely wordfinal, and he usually, though not invariably, uses it for word-final glottal stops in words cited independently. The upshot is that I have generally reproduced Carochi's graves and circumflexes as he has them, only adding a few graves that were missing. On the English side the spacing of letters in the Nahuatl examples has also been regularized following modern grammatical principles. 2 For pur2 As in Andrews, Launey's Grammaire, R. Joe Campbell and Frances Karttunen, Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar (1989), or my Nahuatl as Written.

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

poses of easy recognition, I go very far toward writing elements separately, farther no doubt than one would in a normal transcription of an older text. Even so, I still write together all elements that are orthographically assimilated to each other. My intention is to retain Carochi's orthography (including c!r;lz for [s] and qu for [kw] before [a], both dominant conventions in older written Nahuatl), merely regularizing it. I accept (without really approving of it) his general refusal to write y between i and a, though I hereby warn the reader that forms such as niauh instead of niyauh for "I go" will never be seen in real texts. Carochi is inconsistent on how to write o plus impersonal hua, sometimes putting oa and sometimes ohua. I have simply followed him. I have, however, regularized his inconsistent treatment of io versus iyo, always writing iyo. For the most part Carochi puts i for syllabic [i], y for the glide [y]. At times, however, he writes y for the syllabic vowel; this I have changed to i to conform with his majority practice. Overall Carochi favors n before m instead of the assimilated mm, but with some words and in some parts of the book he writes mm nevertheless. I have arbitrarily decided in favor of nm, which is what one will more often see in texts in general. I also always reproduce the outgoing directional prefix as on; Carochi sometimes writes it as om before p. Carochi mainly, but not invariably, spells Spanish loanwords in Nahuatl in their normal Spanish fashion. In compounds he often but again not always shows the glottal stop after final vowels. I have not changed the appearance of these words on the English side from however they were in the original. In general I have left the capitalization of individual words in the Nahuatl however Carochi has it, but I have capitalized the initial letter of complete utterances and, following his majority usage, have also capitalized proper nouns whenever they appear. The original generally italicizes only Nahuatl; it does waver with Latin but very often leaves it roman. I have retained this most useful visual feature on the English side; except in the front matter I have put the Latin (and any Spanish I have left in) in roman just like the English text, although individual Latin morphemes are in italics. It is the practice these days to enclose inside single or double quotation marks all glosses of words and passages that occur in a main text. I normally do so myself. But seeing how uncluttered the original is, without a single quotation mark in it, and yet how clear it all is, I have attempted to do the same on the English side. A Nahuatl example is followed immediately by its gloss, the two being separated by a comma. When a complete statement

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

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is involved, the first word of both the Nahuatl and the English are capitalized: lnfc nictin onihutilla, hue! yehutitl infc namechmachtfz, The reason why I came is in order to teach you. A few times in the notes a gloss became separated from the Nahuatl and quotation remarks were resorted to for clarity. Carochi is very generous with his glosses of individual words, but sometimes he presumes that by a given point the reader will no longer need to have a particular much-used word defined. Yet many of us use the book as a work of reference more than we read straight through it, and the reader can be pardoned for not recognizing even a very common word. I have supplied glosses in brackets of all unglossed Nahuatl words not defined within the previous page or so. Translating Carochi's Spanish is a quite straightforward task in the main. Most of the problems have to do with his grammatical terminology, of which the thorniest is the question of the word nombre. This term, meaning literally "name," refers to nouns in the vast majority of its occurrences. It does not, however, exactly mean noun; it refers to a broader category which also includes adjectives. Sometimes Carochi uses the terms sustantivo and adjectivo, which can be translated in the normal way. For the rest, I have translated nombre as "noun" whenever that word is applicable and looked for ad hoc solutions where it is not. Carochi's verbal means any noun derived from a verb by standard mechanisms. "Deverbal noun" is perhaps the most correct translation, but it has seemed to me that for a readership doubtless to include laypeople, "verbal noun" will do as well. Quite frequently one will see the term partfcula in Carochi. He does not usually mean what we mean by "particle" today in speaking of Nahuatl grammar: a more or less free-standing word that does not inflect. Most often he is referring to affixes within verbal or nominal complexes, although sometimes he uses the modern meaning as well. I have tended to retain "particle" despite the variance from modem practice. Carochi refers to prefixes indicating subject, object, reflexive object, and possessor as semipronombres. The term is so apt that I have used "semipronoun" as the translation. Most modem scholars have concluded that the saltillo of the early grammarians was a glottal stop, a belief I share, but since there is an element of uncertainty and in any case a transition to today's [h] may have begun as early as Carochi's time, I retain "saltillo" in the translation. The word is in any case frequently used in the English literature on Nahuatl. The word mexicano in Carochi's usage refers to the language we today

EDITOR'S PREFACE

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generally call Nahuatl and to the people who spoke it, perhaps with some expectation that such people were from the vicinity of Mexico City. I believe our term Nahuatl is justified, but it was surely not very common in that language, and it was extremely rare in Spanish. To stay close to the original terminology I have translated mexicano as Mexican when it refers to the language and as Mexica when it refers to people, even though Carochi's meaning is broader than that we usually attach today to Mexica in an ethnic sense. Following a long tradition, Carochi speaks of a syllable as being short or long meaning purely and simply that it has a short or long vowel in it. This manner of speaking, however, goes against another way of viewing the matter, going back to Latin and well known in some circles, that a syllable may be long without a long vowel if it has a certain combination of consonants. In the translation I have often spoken of vowels rather than syllables, retaining the latter only when any alternative would have been awkward. Carochi frequently mentions that a Nahuatl word corresponds to one in Spanish. Where there is a good English equivalent, I have left out the reference to Spanish (which can be easily seen on the Spanish side), mentioning Spanish only when something has no close English parallel. Getting beyond grammatical matters, I have translated V.m. (for vuestra merced, vuesa merced, etc.) as "your grace" because English lacks a separate formal second person; I realize that this rendering does not represent idiomatic English but prefer it to putting "[rev.]" or "[formal]" in often beautifully colloquial passages. Some female speakers appear in Carochi' s examples, and two or three times in the whole book he specifies "he or she," but he overwhelmingly uses masculine forms in his Spanish, and it would be artificial and inappropriate to try to amend his usage three and a half centuries after the fact. One aspect that has been problematic to me is his frequent translation of the possessed -piltzin as hijo, even though he once specifically says that the word can mean either male or female. When he says hijos, the translation can and should be "children." When he says muchacho for piltzintli, one must put "boy." But my feeling is that hijo may have been intended generically much like its plural. I have sometimes put "child" on this basis, though more often "son" (males are meant more often than not).

The notes THE FOOTNOTES in this edition are copious. They attempt to explain for a reader less steeped in Carochi than myself facets of his terminology or his

ENGLISH TRANSLATION. NOTES

-XIX -

analysis that might otherwise seem puzzling, as well as a few inconsistencies which for the most part prove to be apparent only. They give crossreferences to other parts of the book and sometimes mention some related usage seen in older texts outside Carochi. Above all they provide a certain perspective on the historical evolution of the language, a perspective almost totally absent in Carochi's work itself. Much of this type of annotation is aimed at students, to facilitate practical comprehension, for I want to make Carochi a normal resource for all those who are past the first introduction to Nahuatl, along with the modem grammars, and the rich examples here are the best possible transition into work with real texts. At the same time I expound at some length some historical notions little seen in print and close to my heart. Even this often highly technical material I would classify partly under pedagogy, for my experience in teaching older Nahuatl to several cohorts of students is that t~ey grasp inflections and derivations more quickly and firmly when they have some concept of the origin of the elements-which at once makes the material more comprehensible and subsumes its parts under larger patterns-than when they subject it to blanket memorization as an undifferentiated mass of detail. One major function of the notes is to supplement Carochi's glosses of his Nahuatl examples. Carochi varies somewhat in his translation policy, which is sometimes more literal, sometimes less. Often he gives a pragmatic, idiomatic equivalent that is of the greatest value but is so far removed from a literal version that students are entirely at a loss to see what corresponds to what or how the whole comes to mean what it does. Carochi also does not hesitate to leave lesser elements out of consideration in his translations. Thus in many cases I have provided an additional more literal gloss in the notes, not to correct the original gloss but to serve as an intermediary step, letting students see how the translation was arrived at. I suppose that almost all of the translations could have been given that treatment, but I stopped well short of being exhaustive, arbitrarily deciding when I thought a more complete and element-by-element rendering would be useful as a tool. If one can understand Carochi at all, one can deal successfully with some of his more straightforward glosses. To an extent the notes have their own vocabulary. Throughout one will find mention of classes of verbs which are left unlabeled in Carochi himself. Virtually all of his generalizations on verb behavior hold true, but he was impeded in establishing classes by not consistently considering the glottal stop to be an independent segment. A consistent scheme of verb classes, centered on the preterit but including all tenses and moods, was first worked out and published by J. Richard Andrews (1975), delineating Classes A, B,

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

C, and D. Frances Karttunen and myself were at that time moving in the direction of discerning the same classes, which indeed once discovered are entirely uncontroversial; we called them 1, 2, 3, and 4, which is the terminology in Karttunen' s dictionary and also in the notes here. Briefly, Class 1 retains Nahuatl's ancient scheme of forming tenses by suffixes only with no root modification; in most Class 1 verbs phonological features dictate that the final vowel of the root cannot be omitted. Class 2 was by the sixteenth century in a sense Nahuatl's normative group; the final vowel of the root was omitted in the preterit and pluperfect and retained unchanged in all other situations. Class 3 is an offshoot of Class 2. In the present tense it ends in ia or oa, having lost a consonant between the two vowels. In the preterit and pluperfect it loses the final vowel like Class 2 but has a glottal stop at the end, a reflex of the consonant that was once between the two vowels. In many other tenses the final vowel is lost, but the vowel that is penultimate in the present is long rather than followed by a glottal stop. Class 4 consists of a few verbs in a long a; if this a is considered as aa, Class 4 behaves much like Class 3. 1 From time to time the reader will see references in the notes to three stages, meaning stages of the development of the Nahuatl language after the arrival of the Spaniards. They were first explained in Nahuatl in the Middle Years (Karttunen and Lockhart 1976) and were further elaborated within a wider framework in The Nahuas After the Conquest (Lockhart 1992). For a generation, Stage 1 (1519 to 1540 or 1545), Nahuatl was hardly affected, accepting only proper names as loans. In Stage 2, 1540-45 to 1640-50, Nahuatl took in a large stock of Spanish loans, but they were all nouns, and the language was little affected in other respects. In Stage 3, 1640-50 to the present, bilingualism became widespread, strategies were developed for borrowing Spanish verbs and particles, idioms were translated on a large scale, Spanish pronunciations were incorporated, and every aspect of the language showed some impact. 2 What Carochi calls semipronouns are called prefixes (subject, object, reflexive, and possessive) in the notes. What he calls a preposition is called a relational word. In Carochi, a particle is often an affix. In the notes, a particle is an uninflected word outside a noun or verb complex in the stricter sense, apparently freestanding but still closely associated with such a com1For a more detailed explanation see n. 1, pp. 122-25. Special aspects are discussed in notes on many other pages. 2The linguistic stages are explained in detail but succinctly in Lockhart 1992, pp. 261-317.

NOTES. ANALYTICAL INDEX. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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plex and usually placed in front of it. Nahuatl particles for the most part do not divide cleanly into adverbs and conjunctions; the same words in the same locations often share both roles. Analytical index

THE EDITION FEATURES a large index which has entries not only for topics of grammar but for important words. The word entries list only the pages where the word is specifically discussed, along with some of the most salient, instructive instances of its use in examples. Indeed, the reader needs no instruction in how to use the analytical index. The reason I bring up the topic at all is to emphasize that a much more extensive and ambitious compilation is called for. Other commitments prevent my carrying it out, at least for the present, but Jet me give some notion of what I think it should be. Something like what I envision was done long ago by Una Canger and some associates, who made a small Nahuatl dictionary based on Carochi; under each word was a list of all the examples, each nearly in its entirety, in which that word appeared throughout the book (Diccionario de vocablos aztecas contenidos en el Arte de la lengua mexicana de Horacia Carochi, 1976). The work was based on the 1892 edition and used modem phonetic notation, but the mimeographed form I had was very useful to me for years, until someone borrowed it and never returned it. Later Frances Karttunen made much the same sort of compilation on the basis of the original, using an Andrews-style orthography, proceeding much more systematically with the aid of a computer. That listing, however, never reached the public, being only a step toward the creation of Karttunen' s dictionary. A concordance/dictionary of this scale should, it seems to me, not stop at listing all occurrences of words, but classify them according to different meanings and functions, and should not be limited to individual words, but should list and analyze whole set phrases and idioms. Since it will probably not be me who will perform this valuable task, however, I will cease to pontificate on how it should be done. Acknowledgments

FIRST OF ALL I should thank Arthur Anderson for having started things by impressing on me the importance of Carochi's Arte and supplying me with a copy. Then my students over the years, who kept me coming back to the work in the attempt to elucidate it for them and in the process made me more familiar with it. Then Ida Altman for getting me a photocopy of the original some years in advance of the publication of a facsimile (the photo-

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

copy, now in a Mexican binding, is still overall superior to the facsimile). Then Andrews and Launey for their grammars, and Canger for her book on verbs in -oa; the three works brought clarity to many things I was only in the process of understanding, and I doubt if I would ever have hit on the important masking of vowel quantity in ia and oa if Canger hadn't. Then Karttunen, and Canger again, for the lexical work through which I grasped something of the phonology involved and began to know Carochi's examples as a corpus. Then William Bright for a sympathetic reading of the manuscript. Then Rebecca Hom and Susan Schroeder for participating in one of the most difficult proofreading enterprises ever. And finally Stafford Poole for translating most of the Latin in the Arte; I could not have done it adequately myself (I trust he will forgive me for having made some minor stylistic revisions in the translations). 1

J.L. Frazier Park, California September, 2000

10ne of the purposes of the present edition was to achieve a degree of correctness much higher than that of the edition of 1892. I hope that that aim has been achieved, but I must admit that after I and others had taken what seemed infinite pains and considered our work done, in a final pass almost for amusement Rebecca Hom and I still came upon some glaring errors with letters and diacritics in the Nahuatl on both sides. Some people who saw this edition before publication were good enough to say that it is a pleasure to use, the layout a marvel of clarity and informativeness, but I dare not hope that we have found the last of the mistakes in what is, from another point of view, a multidimensional morass, and I beg the reader's pardon for those that remain. In a related afterthought, I want to emphasize that the vowel quantities indicated in the Nahuatl on the English side, even when they are exactly what I intended, must in many cases be taken as an approximation and even compromise. For example, I have given the applicative of cui as cuilia with a short i in the stem because that is the general view and is consonant with Carochi's overall treatment of the i of cui as short, even though he several times has curlia (which is so reproduced of course on the Spanish side), and I am convinced that that was the dominant pronunciation in his milieu, pointing to a historically long vowel in the basic verb itself.

Transcription and Translation of the Grammar

ARTE DE

LA LENGV A MEXICANA CON LA DECLARACION DE LOS ADVERBIOS DELLA.

Al Illustriss.o y Reuerendiss.o

Senor Don Iuan de Mafiozca Ar~obispo de Mexico, del Consejo de su Magestad, &c.

POR EL PADRE HORAC/0 CAROCHI Rector de la Compafiia de IESVS de San Pedro, y San Pablo de Mexico.

Aiio de

t

IHS

1645

IMPRESSO CON LICENCIA En ME X I C 0: Por Juan Ruyz. Aiio de 1645. 2

GRAMMAR OF

THE MEXICAN LANGUAGE WITH AN EXPLANATION OF ITS ADVERBS.

To The Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord don Juan de Mafiozca, Archbishop of Mexico City, of His Majesty's Council, etc.

BY FATHER HORACIO CAROCHI Rector of the College of San Pedro y San Pablo of the Company of Jesus in Mexico City.

Year of

t

IHS

1645

PRINTED WITH PERMISSION In ME X I C 0 CITY by Juan Ruiz. Year of 1645. 3

4

ORIGINAL FRONT MA TIER

LICENCIA.

D

ON GARCIA SARMIENTO DE SOTOMAYOR, Conde de Saluatierra, Marques de Sobroso, de Ia Orden de Santiago, Comendador de Ia Villa de los Santos de Maimona, Gentilhobre de Ia Camara de su Magestad, su Virrey, Lugarteniente, Gouernador, y Capitan General de esta nueua Espana, y Presidente de Ia Audiencia, y Chancilleria Real, que en ella reside, etc. Por quanta el P. Simon Cotta Procurador general della Copafiia de IE S V S de Ia Prouincia de Philipinas, en nombre del Colegio de S. Pedro y S. Pablo desta Ciudad, me ha hecho relacion, que el Padre Horacia Carochi de Ia dicha Copafiia, y Rector del dicho Colegio, eminente en Ia lengua Mexicana a honra, y gloria de Dios, y aprouechamiento de los ministros de los naturales, ha copuesto vn Arte muy curiosa de Ia dicha lengua, y para ij aya copia del, quiere el dicho Colegio imprimirlo a su costa, y me pidio mandasse dar licencia, para que qualquiera impressor pueda imprimir dicho Arte, prohibiendo que otro alguno, sino el que se eligiere lo imprima, a que prouei, viesse el dicho Arte el Bachiller Don Bartolome de Alua, y diesse su parecer, y auiendole dado, en conformidad de Ia aprouacion que hizo, ij vista por mi, por Ia presente doy, y concedo licencia al dicho Padre Horacia Carochi, para ij pueda hazer imprimir dicho Arte en lengua Mexicana, a qualquier impressor de los desta Ciudad, y ninguno otro lo haga sin su arden, pena de perdidos los moldes, y aderentes. Fecho en Mexico a3. dias del mes de Junia de mil y seisientos y quarenta y cinco afios.

El Conde de Saluatierra. Por mandado de su Excellencia, Don Phelipe Moran de Ia Zerda.

LICENCIA.

E

L DOCTOR DON PEDRO DE BARRIENTOS LOMELIN, Thesorero de

Ia Santa Iglesia Cathedral Metropolitana desta Ciudad de Mexico, Consultor, y Ordinario del Santo Officio de Ia Inquisicion desta nueba Espana, Iuez Prouisor, y Vicario General deste An;obispado por el

5

PERMISSIONS

PERMISSION.

D

ON GARCiA SARMIENTO DE SOTOMAYOR, Count of Salvatierra, Marques of Sabroso, member of the Order of Santiago, Comendador of the town of Santos de Maimona, gentleman of the chamber of His Majesty, his viceroy, lieutenant, governor, and captain general here in New Spain and president of the Audiencia and royal chancery here resident, etc. Whereas Father Simon Cotta, general representative of the Company of J E S U S of the province of the Philippines, has informed me in name of the College of San Pedro and San Pablo of this city that Father Horacio Carochi of that company and rector of that college, an eminent master of the Mexican language for the honor and glory of God and the benefit of the ministers to the natives, has composed a most learned grammar of that language, and so that there should be a supply available, the College wants to print it at its own cost, and he requested me to order permission given so that any printer could print this grammar, prohibiting that any other than the one chosen should print it, upon which I decreed that bachiller don Bartolome de Alba inspect it and give his opinion, and he having given it, in conformity with the approval which he gave and which has been seen by me, I hereby give and grant permission to the said Father Horacio Carochi so that he can have this grammar of the Mexican language printed by any printer of those of this city, and no other is to do it without his orders under penalty of loss of the forms with the print in them and associated equipment. Done in Mexico City on the 3rd day of the month of June of the year 1645.

The Count of Salvatierra. By order of His Excellency, Don Felipe Moran de la Cerda.

PERMISSION.

D

OCTOR DON PEDRO DE BARRIENTOS LOMELIN, treasurer of the holy metropolitan cathedral of Mexico City here, consultant and judge of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of New Spain, judge, administrator general, and vicar general of this archbishopric for the

6

ORIGINAL FRONT MATIER

Illustrissimo Senor D. Iuan de Manozca Ar