Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Nahuatl is spoken by something like 1-2 million people and is probably the fifth most spoken indigenous language in the Americas

http://www.native-languages.org/most-spoken.htm

and the most-spoken in Mexico.

I think the title (and to a slight extent the text of the article) make the language sound like a rare curiosity but it's actually a major cultural phenomenon. Grabbing some numbers (which are always subject to definitional quarrels), I think Nahuatl is as common in Mexico as Tagalog in the U.S. (by absolute number of speakers) or as Chinese in the U.S. (by proportion of the population).

Among many other things, our words for tomato, avocado, chili, and chocolate all derive from Nahuatl.

(Edit: of course the social role of indigenous languages in Mexico is different from that of Tagalog or Chinese in the U.S., and the main indigenous languages there are strongly associated with rural and semi-rural communities, as this article points out... which might mean that city-dwelling Mexicans might have quite a bit less contact with Nahuatl and Maya languages than city-dwellers in the U.S. would have with Tagalog or Chinese.)

When visiting Mayan ruins outside of Tulum, Mexico the guide told me his father still lives in the Yucatán forest and his primary language being Maya (and unrelated, smokes a lot of pot apparently). I ignorantly assumed these languages disappeared with their civilizations.

The Mayan languages stopped being written, but not spoken, by their language community as a result of the Spanish conquest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#Writing_system...

In particular, this was an effort to suppress Maya religion that led to an almost complete loss of knowledge of the original writing system. Later on Maya started being written with Latin characters, but there are still lots of native speakers who are functionally literate in Spanish but not in Maya.

The Spanish word for avocado derives from Nahuatl.

Awakatl -> aguacate.

The English word is an old spelling for advocate. Some dude confused both back in the day.

Now if someone would fix this historical issue with marketing, would make me very happy.

The correct spelling of the Nahuatl root is "āhuacatl".

I found this spelling here

https://nah.wiktionary.org/wiki/awakatl

I think both spellings refer to the same sounds.

I always thought avocado was the Spanish word, and guaca along with guacamole (guaca + mole meaning sauce) was the indigenous word.

Seems like a plausible guess, but Wikipedia says

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guacamole#Spanish

> From Classical Nahuatl āhuacamōlli, from āhuacatl (“avocado fruit”) + mōlli (“sauce, something ground”).

You're right.

Avocado -- mid 17th century: Spanish alteration (influenced by avocado ‘advocate’) of aguacate, from Nahuatl ahuacatl.

Guacamole -- from an Aztec dialect via Nahuatl "āhuaca molli", which translates to "avocado sauce/concoction".

> (influenced by avocado ‘advocate’)

I think you mean "influenced by abogado ‘advocate’".

Which is pronounced with /β/, a sound closer to /v/ than /b/.

I wonder what sound changes led from the Latin pronunciation [adwo] to Spanish [aβo]. (I'm sure this is well known, just not by me!)

The dropping of /d/ is not surprising. This happens all over the place. Look at Latin "ad" becoming Spanish "a" for a simple example. (ad like the preposition built into this very word, ad + vocare)

The classical /w/ from Latin obviously became /v/ in a lot of romance languages. /b/ and /v/ merging to create [β] I think was particular to Spain and pretty old. But I think I also read that in many places vulgar Latin /b/ had a [v] allophone, but still distinct from /w/ (orthographic v) which I guess evolved into /v/ outside Iberia with the old [v] sticking around as /b/.

Here is one of the top google hits from an old saying about this: "beati hispani quibus vivere bibere est" --http://en.antiquitatem.com/felices-hispani-quibus-vivere-est... -- this seems to put the b, v merger at the first century AD and have a lot of quotes about Iberians doing it it from the ~1500s, blaming it on Basques.

By the way, in my amateur opinion the much more head-spinny Iberian sound change was the creation of modern /x/ in words like "Quijote" or "México". It would seem that the Spaniards conquered the new world with those things as [ʃ], transcribed a bunch of Mexican place names with that, then later changed the sound to [x], and brought the change back to the colonies. It is interesting to me that such a pronunciation change in relatively isolated populations can still be held on both sides of an ocean, and not have some other form just end up as one side's peculiar accent, as occurred with, say the evolution of the [θ] sound.

In Colombia avocado is called Aguacate / Ahuacate, which supports your hypothesis.

Avocado is the English word. Aguacate is the Spanish word which was derived from the Nahuatl āhuacatl.

Abogado? No gracias.

Mayan languages are also spoken by millions of people in Mexico and Guatemala.

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