Codex documenting Aztec culture now digitized | Hacker News Reader

Codex documenting Aztec culture now digitized

hyperallergic.com

74 pointsdiodorus13 comments

The sad thing is that there isn't really anything new here. It's the Anderson and Dibble translation, and some random extra stuff. For 15 years work it's quite a limited contribution. In addition, it's not freely licensed. I'm working on a free/open-source licensed edition with linguistic annotation. If anyone is interested, ask for the link, it's on GitHub.

Link?

Here is an example of what were producing so far for book 5 "the omens": https://github.com/ftyers/UD_Classical_Nahuatl-FloCo/blob/ma...

The repo is kind of messy, it's mostly me and some students working on it, but we're pretty passionate. Let me know if you'd like to get involved! :)

Note that the annotation is alignable with images of the original manuscript, which are online at the Library of Congress. I.e. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667850/

The [orig] contains all the original token and line breaks.

That's really cool. I went deep into epigraphy when I lived in Guatemala and was regularly finding carved pottery in our garden beds. Spent a lot of time annotating paper copies of glyphs.

What's the way to view/edit the .conllu files?

They're generated from a tonne of Python scripts, but feel free to get in contact and I can take you through how it works ! :)

Isn't it also the "García Garagarza" Spanish-English translation? Or is that what you mean by some extra stuff.

Yeah, that's what I mean, e.g. it's mostly existing published stuff. The new stuff is some partial summarisation in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, and some spoken audio (by EHN speakers), although, it's unclear what the audio gains. Without training, it's not really intelligible to most speakers of modern varieties.

It's also available online at UNAM, https://temoa.iib.unam.mx/ along with a lot of other texts (see pages beginning with CF "Códice Florentino"), e.g. https://temoa.iib.unam.mx/cf_05_v

It makes me very happy to see ancient texts digitized for the world to see.

If only the Spaniards hadn't burned every codex they could get their hands on. There are 12 surviving pre-contact Aztec codexes. The Aztecs produced 480000 sheets of paper annually. That amounts to heaps of records and knowledge that was destroyed.

True, but it's also interesting to see what survived. My wife is a Nahuatl speaker, and some of the stuff in the book on Omens is still part of the culture, e.g. About owls being a sign of death.

Links back to https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/

alternate pop sci news item for this https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/digital-florentine-cod...

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