College Archives

Nahuatl:
The Evolution of an Ancient Language

Curated by Erin Richardson (Archives Intern - Spring 2024)

Nahuatl, or Mexicana, is the language of the Nahua people, and was the most broadly spoken language of the Aztec empire. There are roughly 1.5 million Mexican people who speak Nahuatl today. The Nahuatl language has a rich history, beginning in the 7th century and lasting until today.  

The Aztecs had a rich oral tradition that transferred to a fully developed pictographic writing system. While very little of these pictographic texts remain due to the destruction of Aztec materials by the Spanish, the few that remain tell of historical, mythical, and cosmological events. With the arrival of the Spanish, the Nahuatl language began to adopt the Latin alphabet into its writing system. Nahuatl words written in the Latin alphabet were used alongside the pictorial writing.  

In 1519, the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire lead by Hernán Cortés began and Nahuatl evolved again. Latin alphabetical text started to replace pictorial writing, and some Aztecs began to record orally kept literature, songs and poems. Along with the Spanish conquest came Franciscan and Dominican friars to speed along the Aztec’s forced assimilation to Spanish culture by converting them to Christianity.  

By the end of the conquest in 1521, friars were beginning to write books on Nahuatl grammar, vocabulary, and religious material. By 1550, Nahuatl began to borrow Spanish nouns, and created new words to describe imported materials. Spanish also began to borrow words from Nahuatl. Avocado, chili, and chocolate are English words that have Nahuatl origin. Despite the Spanish’s attempted to squash out Aztec culture, the culture has persisted until today, and still maintains a strong presence in central Mexico. The Nahuatl language evolved during the conquest of the Aztec empire and continued to evolve during the colonization of Mexico. Now, it is spoken by 1.5 million people and is revered as a culturally rich language that is one of the most studied languages of the Americas.    

Manval mexicano de la administracion de los santos sacramentos, conforme al Manual Toledano (1634)

This book, written by Francisco de Lorra Baquio, would have been used with the Manuel Toledano, or another liturgical work. It contains several prayers in Nahuatl, as well as prayers in Spanish and Latin.   

Image: Example page from Manval Mexicano... (Vining PM 4068.4 .L55 1634)

Confessionario En Lengua Mexicana y Castellana (1599)

Printed in 1599, this book, written by Friar Juan Bautista, was printed in the “Golden Age” of Nahuatl document production (1580-1610). During this time period, there was an increased output of Nahuatl printing as the Spanish began to administrate their rule over the Aztec people, and the Franciscan and Dominican churches began their (forced) conversion work. Confessionario is a Franciscan document that contains the Confessional in both Nahuatl and Spanish. 

Image: Example pages from Confessionario (Vining PM 4068.4 .B42 1599)

Vocabulario en la lengua Castellana y Mexicana (1555)

Known as one of the rarest books in the world, Alonso de Molina’s Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary was the first dictionary published in the New World. Molina was a Franciscan friar who had spent most of his life in Mexico and learned Nahuatl at an early age. The Catholic church oversaw the publishing of grammatical and language material alongside religious materials.   

Image: Example page of Vocabulario (Vining PM 4066 .M7)

The despatches of Hernando Cortés (1843)

Translated by George Folsom from Cortés’ original Spanish letters into English, these letters were sent by Cortés to emperor Charles V during his conquest of the Aztec empire. The pages on display are from letter two, where Cortés describes the Aztec capitol Tenochtitlan.

Image: Example page (p.118) from The despatches of Hernando Cortés (Vining F 1230 .C85)

The despatches of Hernando Cortés (1843)

Image: Example page (p.119) from The despatches of Hernando Cortés (Vining F 1230 .C85)

Plan of Tenochtitlan (1887)

Tenochtitlan was founded by the Aztecs in 1325 on the islands of Lake Texcoco. The center of the city was devoted to Temples, with the rest of the city being divided into four sections. This map was designed after the Spanish conquest, during which most of the city was destroyed.   

Image: Plan of Tenochtitlan from The Aztecs; their history, manners, and customs by Lucien Biart  (Vining F 1219 .B57)

Map of Anahuac (1887)

Containing five interlocking lakes, including Lake Texcoco, Anahuac was the center of the Aztec empire. The Anahuac region was where the Nahuatl language was most broadly spoken.  

Image: Map of Anahuac from The Aztecs; their history, manners, and customs by Lucien Biart  (Vining F 1219 .B57)

About the Vining Collection

The summer of 2021 marked the 100^th anniversary of the gift of the Vining Collection. It was bequeathed as a memorial to Edward Payson Vining (1847-1920), who himself had been, according to the institution’s 1921 catalogue, “sympathetic with the scholarly work and evangelical loyalty of Gordon College.” The collection consists of some 7,000 books, manuscripts, and letters, ranging from the 12^th century to the early 20^th century. It boasts over 900 Bibles in 140 languages. It is also rich in Shakespeareana, Early Americana, geography, travel literature, ethnology, and especially philology—with vast holdings in indigenous languages.

Vining had made his fortune as a “railroad man,” serving for many years as freight manager of the Union Pacific Railroad and later as general manager of the San Francisco street-railway system. His career took him far and wide, putting him literally on the map, for the town of Vining, Kansas was named in his honor. After his retirement in his early 50s, he devoted the remainder of his life to book collecting and research. Vining authored an eclectic array of scholarly studies and had working knowledge of some fifty languages. In his most ambitious foray into philology and ethnology—an 800-paged monograph titled An Inglorious Columbus (1885)—he contended that Buddhist monks from Afghanistan had first discovered America in the 5^th Century. As a scholar, Vining is mainly remembered for his work on Shakespeare. He was a founding member of the New York Shakespeare Society and edited the Hamlet volume of the organization’s republication of the Bard’s collected works (1888). In The Mystery of Hamlet (1881), his most significant contribution to the field, Vining advanced the unorthodox theory that the dithering “prince” was in fact a woman who posed as a man to preserve the succession of the Danish throne. His hypothesis shaped Danish actress Asta Nielsen’s 1920 version of Hamlet for the silver screen and also earned him a fleeting mention in James Joyces’ Ulysses (Ch. IX). Vining was an autodidact and never attended college. He did, however, receive an honorary A.M. from Yale University in 1886 and was granted an LL.D. degree from William Jewell College in 1908. He was also a trustee at the University of Chicago (1886-88).