Introduction to Causative Verbs

The causative construction in English involves an auxiliary verb of causation taking as its direct object the person being made to act plus an infinitive of that action: ‘I make/have/let him eat, I cause/compel/force/induce him to eat’. Instead of a construction with an auxiliary verb, Nahuatl creates a derivative version of the original verb with the suffixes -tia, -ltia (see details in a later discussion), and the new verb means ‘to cause (the object) to verb’: tzàtzītia ‘make shout’, yōlītia ‘make/let live’, cualtia ‘make eat, feed’, chīhualtia ‘have build’. Verbs formed in this way can be put in any tense.

Causative verbs have a predictable relationship with the verbs from which they are derived. If the verb ‘shout’ speaks only of the person shouting, to ‘make someone shout’ speaks of the person shouting and of the “causer” who makes that person shout, and if ‘eat’ speaks only of the eater and the thing eaten, to ‘make someone eat’ speaks in addition of a causer who makes someone eat. In other words, when the verb is changed from its simple form (i.e., the regular dictionary listing) to the causative, we have the following effects, which are similar in both English and Nahuatl:

• intransitive verbs become transitive and transitive verbs become bitransitive.

• the subject of the causative verb signifies the “causer”, and the term that would be the subject (and agent) of the simple verb becomes the direct object of the causative.

Clauses as Subject or Object: Indirect Questions

As in English, a clause in Nahuatl can serve as the subject or object of a verb, in one of two ways.

The first is when it is used as an indirect questions. We have already seen examples several times (4.10, 5.4, 14.6–7 etc.). The term indirect question signifies that a question is being reported (i.e., it is dependent upon a verb of saying or thinking), and in English, this change in the status of the question is indicated by a change in word order. In the direct question, the order of the subject is inverted, so that the verb precedes the verb, but in an indirect question, the regular order subject–verb is retained. Also, the person of the verb in the question is changed as appropriate. Thus, you would report the direct question ‘What do you want?’ by saying ‘He asks what I want’. In Nahuatl, an indirect question changes the person of its verb if necessary, but the tense and word order are otherwise unaffected. If the corresponding direct question would be introduced by an interrogative word, the indirect question likewise begins with this interrogative, which may or may not be preceded by in. An indirect question of the type ‘if/whether’ in English, which goes back to a direct question expecting simple yes/no answer, can be introduced in Nahuatl with (in) cuix but also with (in) àzo.

The people generally known as the Aztecs called themselves “Mexica” (méxìcâ). “Aztec” means ‘from Aztlān’, the mythical starting point of the Mexica's migration to the south. Their language was called nāhuatl or nāhuatlàtōlli ‘clear speech’ or even méxìcatlàtōlli ‘Mexica speech’.

The century that followed the Spanish conquest saw the death of a great part of the native population, the dismantling of their social system and the irrevocable alteration of their culture. This historic catastrophe – one of the greatest in human history – was partially attenuated thanks to the efforts of some enlightened friars and certain native notabilities, who gathered or composed all sorts of texts in Nahuatl: legends, discourses, historical chronicles, compilations of traditional knowledge.

This textbook is an introduction to this language. It aims to satisfy the interest in Nahuatl that has arisen in recent years. In various universities and institutions, historians, ethnographers and linguists have offered students and investigators of very diverse origins courses and seminars relating to the Aztec sphere. I hope that this work will be of some utility to them and that it will receive a favorable welcome.

I imagine that it will be of equal interest to linguists, who may not particularly deepen the study of indigenous Mexican history and culture, but who seek to expand the field of available linguistic data and so are looking for reliable descriptions of as many languages as possible.

Attributives

We have already had occasion to see (Lesson 12) that in Nahuatl there are not any adjectives properly speaking, just nouns derived from verb forms that tend to be translated by adjectives in languages such as English. Conversely, the capacity to modify nouns does not constitute a specific category of words in Nahuatl, because a noun can be modified by an “adjective,” another noun, a locative, or (as we will see later) any verbal form. In English, an adjective that directly modifies a noun is placed in front of it (e.g., ‘the big dog…’). We will call any Nahuatl form that modifies a noun in this way an attributive. Here we will deal with nouns with an adjectival sense in English (12.2), quasi-adjectives derived from verbs (12.4–6), possessive nouns (11.7), and locatives used adjectivally.

The attributive can precede or follow its noun. The order is (determiner)-attributive-noun or (determiner)-noun-attributive (“determiner” means a form like in or inin, inon, or cē, ōme, miyac etc.). This order is obviously much freer than in English; it is difficult to give general principles for the placement of attributives, and the most that can be said is that the following forms always appear before their noun:

• cualli, yēctli ‘good’: cualli tlācatl ‘good person’

• quantifiers, including huēyi

• huēhuê ‘old’: in huēhuê Motēuczōma ‘Moctezuma the Elder’

• locatives: in Caxtillān tlaīlli ‘wine (drink from Castile)’, in huècapan tlālli ‘the high country, uplands’; in nechca tetl ‘the stone (located) there’; in ilhuicac āhuiyacāyōtl ‘the fragrance in heaven, heavenly fragrance’

Comparative

Many languages (particularly Indo-European ones) have special markers to indicate the comparative (forms meaning, e.g., ‘bigger’, ‘more exciting’). In English, the comparative is usually formed by either placing ‘more’ in front of the adjective (‘more interesting’) or adding ‘-er’ to the word in the case of monosyllabic adjectives (‘hotter’). This comparatively straightforward procedure does not apply to Nahuatl, which has several phrases available to say ‘X is more adjective than Y’. In English, the phrase indicating the person/thing against which the comparison is made is introduced with ‘than’ and follows the comparative. For the sake of convenience, we will use the express “than-phrase” to refer to the corresponding part of the Nahuatl comparison (even though there is no simple word for ‘than’).

A major type of comparative phrase consists of saying (with assorted variants), ‘X is adjective, Y not’. There is often a mark of intensification in front of the “adjective”. This can be oc ‘still’, cencâ ‘very’, achi ‘rather’, yê ‘yet’ (see 33.7), or more often with a combination of these: oc achi (most frequent), oc cencâ, oc yê, oc yê achi, oc yê cencâ:

Tāchcāuh ‘strongly’ or huālcâ ‘more’ can be used in place of achi or cencâ, but most commonly oc tāchcāuh or oc huālcâ is followed by inic:

Tlapanahuia ‘it is surpassing’ can also be used:

Note carefully that in these constructions we do not have **oc nitāchcāuh/nihuālcâ or nitlapanahuia; these verbs remain in the third person singular because their subject is the clause inic nichicāhuac ‘how I'm strong’.

When you go on to apply your knowledge to reading Classical Nahuatl literature, you will find in both the original documents and the editions that have been made from them an orthography that is somewhat different from the one that you have become accustomed to during the use of this book. Recall that the uniform orthography adopted here (and used by many linguists) substantially agrees with the traditional manner of spelling but eliminates from it certain ambiguities and errors.

The traditional orthography is at once less exact, regularly leaves out significant elements and is applied erratically. In this appendix, you will find notes that will hopefully spare you any astonishment when you first come into contact with texts that follow the old orthograph and put you in a position to recognize the true phonetic structure of words where that orthography is uncertain or defective.

The information is correlated with the presentation of the phonology given in the Preliminary Lesson. In Table A.1 you will find, from left to right:

• the phonological unit (phoneme) between slashes

• the spelling used in this book

• any relevant discussion of the traditional writing, with examples (the traditional spelling comes first and then the “normalized” spelling used in this book follows in parentheses)