Language, culture, and writing: reflections on the interpretation of pictorial manuscripts in the native central Mexican tradition (original) (raw)
Indigenous Writing and Literacy in Colonial Mexico
Ucla Historical Journal, 1992
Ma quimatican Yn quexquichtin quitasque yhuan quipohuasque Ynin esCritura de Benta ticchihua Yn tehuantin... Let those know who should see and read this instrument of sale made by us... cin ualic u >ibtabal in testamento tu tanil in yum Batab y_ Justicias... I state my will for it to be written down before the batab and magistrates... yodzanacahui tutu yaha dzaha nudzahui... Let this document in the "Mixtec" language be read...Πntroduction to Indigenous Writing Soon after the arrival of Europeans in the land that they called New Spain, Franciscan and Dominican friars taught the art of alphabetic writing to members of the indigenous elite. As a result, indigenous peoples during the colonial Mexican period produced (mostly legal) documentation in their own languages using the Roman alphabet. The first group to do this were the Nahuas (sometimes called "Aztecs") of central Mexico; material in Nahuatl has survived in greater quantities than sources from other Indigenous Writing and Literacy 9 language-groups and has been studied far more by scholars. dditional work has also been published on Yucatec Maya and Cakchiquel sources and, more recently, on Mixtec documentation. There are also sources, known of but unstudied by scholars, in Zapotec, Chocho, Quiche, Otomi, Tarascan and no doubt other Mesoamerican languages.-^Smaller bodies of documents that have not surfaced or survived may have been written in lesser-spoken languages (see Figure 1: Map of Mesoamerican Languages). This chapter makes general remarks about indigenous-language documentation of colonial Mexico, but our specific comments refer only to the sources with which we are familiar-those in Nahuatl, Mixtec and (Yucatec) Maya. Our concern is to draw attention to the existence of these sources, to the ethnohistorical work in which they have been utilized, and to the potential this material holds for future study. In discussing the characteristics of indigenous sources in three different languages, we are hereby contributing a comparative framework that has yet to receive adequate attention, as well as working towards the disintegration of the term "Indian"~found by ethnohistorians to be increasingly inaccurate and unhelpful, save in its reflection of the Spaniards' racial per
Fuentes MesoAmericanas, Vol. 7, Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2020
Order at: https://mexicon.de/product/fuentes-mesoamericanas-7-2020/ The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is one of the most beautiful Aztec manuscripts from the early colonial period of Mexico. The first half of this codex relates to the Aztecan calendar system, whereas the second one is a detailed account of Aztec history, spanning a time from the beginning of the mythical migration of the Mexica in the eleventh century to the early colonial period in the mid-sixteenth century, including such far-reaching events as the foundation of Tenochtitlan, the war against Tlatelolco, and the conquest of Tenochtitlan led by Hernán Cortés in the years 1519–1521. This eventful history was recorded in a native writing system that can be described as a sophisticated composition of iconography, calendar notation, and such signs that are linked to the language of the Aztecs: Nahuatl. Even though the original Nahuatl text is accompanied by Spanish annotations written in Latin letters, many of the Nahuatl writing signs hitherto remained undeciphered. The first part of the present volume addresses the principles of this exceptional writing system. The second part is a meticulous study of the historical section, presenting numerous new decipherment proposals for yet uninterpreted or misinterpreted signs. The study is topped off with three catalogs, each printed in color: a catalog of the Nahuatl writing signs appearing in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis including their proposed reading, and two catalogs of the deciphered place signsa and the name signs of the depicted historical figures, respectively.
On the classification of graphs in Central Mexican pictorial writing
Indigenous graphic communication systems: a theoretical approach, 2019
The visual language manifested in the pictorial writing of Central Mexico lies on the blurry border between the European semantic categories of “visual arts” and “writing.” Since the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, scholars have argued about the relationship between this system of visual communication and the semantic or phonetic structures used by native artist-scribes. This discussion continues today, without a clear consensus, although progress has been made in recent decades. In this study I present a theoretical framework for classifying Central Mexican graphic signs, or graphs, building on the foundations provided by Geoffrey Sampson thirty years ago. Sampson’s ideas, concepts and terms are ideally suited for determining the nature of this system of pictorial writing, particularly its possible relation to the verbal languages used by the diverse peoples that participated in the relatively homogenous culture that existed in this region around the time of the Spanish conquest. This plurilingual context, including languages belonging to distinct families, was an important factor in the emergence and development of this pictorial and graphic system. In previous studies I have applied Sampson’s system of classification to the toponymic graphs found in two pre-Hispanic sculptures from the Nahuatl-speaking polity of Mexico Tenochtitlan and to all the pictorial signs in the early colonial period Huichapan Codex, painted in an Otomi-speaking town in the Mezquital Valley, north of the Valley of Mexico. Here four examples of graphs from these native pictorial texts have been selected to illustrate how these pictorial signs may be classified.
Towards a Complex Theory of Writing: The Case of Aztec and Mixtec Codices
Signata, 2022
The aim of this paper is to propose the elements of a new theory of writing and writing systems. It concentrates in the decades-long controversy about whether to consider the highly pictorial communication system present in Aztec, Mixtec and other non-Maya Mesoamerican pictorial codices as writing. After exposing the history of this controversy and the problematic elements in contemporary grammatological and semasiographic visions, I propose to treat Aztec and Mixtec writing as complex systems which depict language through bottom-up strategies (logograms and/or syllabograms, which are signs which try to represent the morphological and phonological levels of language), and top-down strategies (pictography, which is a semantic depiction aided by contextual inferences grounded in pragmatics), strategies which roughly correspond to the bottom-up and top-down language processing operations. Based on this idea, I propose that semiotic writing strategies are possible, and that writing should not be seen as a mere surrogate of phonetics: this vision could solve the long-standing question of why writing systems which developed phoneticism seem to start in a non-phonetic stage that is still treated, in an unclear way, as ‘proto-writing’.
2016
Author(s): Lopez, Felicia Rhapsody | Advisor(s): Aldana, Gerardo | Abstract: ABSTRACTMayahuel and Tlahuizcalpanteuctli in the Nahua Codices: Indigenous Readings of Nahuatl Pictorial and Alphabetic Texts byFelicia Rhapsody LopezPrior to colonization, diverse Indigenous populations across the area now known as Mesoamerica developed complex writing systems. In this dissertation, I examine Postclassic Mesoamerica as a time and place with shared knowledge that spanned across regions inhabited by diverse linguistic groups. During this time, the Nahuatl language served as a spoken lingua franca, and the Mixteca-Puebla writing style (used by Nahuatl speaking people) served as a written lingua franca. As such, my approach makes these glyphic texts (such as the Codex Borgia and other Borgia Group codices) and alphabetic Nahuatl texts (such as the Florentine Codex and the Codex Chimalpopoca) central to the understanding of indigenous culture. Using this approach, I begin by reexamining the way...
Isabel Laack, 2019
Because of copyright reasons, only a preview is available for download here. In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
The path from Aztlan to Mexico, on visual narration in Mesoamerican codices
Navarrete Linares, Federico, “The path from Aztlan to Mexico, on visual narration in Mesoamerican codices”, in Res. Aesthetics and Anthropology, 2000, vol. 37, pp. 31-48.
The aim of this article is to examine certain graphic conventions used to represent time and space in sixteenth-century Mesoamerican pictographic codices dealing with the history of the Mexica migration.1 This will, in turn, lead to an analysis of such documents as visual narratives. The most remarkable of these conventions is a set of lines or blocks marking distance and duration that unites the towns of Aztlan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the beginning and the end of the Mexica migration, and that appears in different guises in all the codices dealing with that historical event. Perhaps the best known codex dealing with the Mexica migration is the Codex Boturini (also called Tira de la Peregrinaci?n, Codex Boturini 1975). In this beautiful sixteenth-century pictorial history, the distance between Aztlan and Mexico is marked by two different lines (fig. 1).2 The first is a row of footprints representing the path followed by the Mexica in their migration; the second is a continuous line that unites the rectangular year signs that represent the time elapsed during the migration. These two lines are carefully intertwined throughout the codex: the footprints always begin near a year sign, clearly establishing the date of the departure of the Mexica from each place, and they lead to a place sign, the next stopping point in their migration. Each place sign, in turn, is followed by a meandering block of year frames that represents the length of the sojourn of the Mexica in that place. In this way, time and space are