| Nahuatl Transcription |
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(The following examples uses Nahuatl-SAMPA notation. See SAMPA Chart For Nahuatl for the X-SAMPA and IPA equivalents.) PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION A faithful Phonemic Transcription needs to represent the following phonemes: consonants: :voiceless stops: /p/, /t/, /k/, /q/, (/h/) :voiceless affricates: /z/, /r/, /c/ :voiceless fricatives: /s/, /x/ :voiced nasals: /m/, /n/ :laterals: /l/ :semivowels: /v/, /y/ vowels: :short: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ :long: /a:/, /e:/, /i:/, /o:/ : (glottalized: /ah/, /eh/, /ih/, /oh/ ) (Note): the glottal stop and the glottalized vowels are parenthesised because ''either'' one ''or'' the other is needed (depending on the grammatical interpretation chosen), but not both. A phonemic transcription of Nahuatl must distinguish between the Long And Short Vowels shown above. Unfortunately, this is not usually done in practice. This omission may hinder learners of Nahuatl and cause confusion due to Minimal Pair s. PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION A faithful Phonetic Transcription needs to take into account the fact that the following phonemes have multiple phonetic realizations: (the 0 subdindex represents the ''devoiced'' version of the corresponding phoneme) /n/: : {Link without Title} _p : {Link without Title} : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /m/: : {Link without Title} _# : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /l/: : {Link without Title} V_V : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /y/: : {Link without Title} _#, _t : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /r/: : {Link without Title} l_ : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /s/: : {Link without Title} ?_? : {Link without Title} ''otherwise'' /o:/: : {Link without Title} stressed : {Link without Title} otherwise MORPHEMIC TRANSCRIPTION A faithful Morphemic Transcription would have to provide a graphemic representation for each element of the set of morphemes in the language: :-cal- → Kal :-tl- → Tl :-ä- → A :-chi- → Ci :-hua- → Ua ''ächihuacalli'' → ACiUaKalTl SYLLABIC TRANSCRIPTION A faithful Syllabic Transcription would have to provide a graphemic representation for each element of the set of all valid syllables in the language, which is the same set as that of the morphemes, since all Nahuatl morphemes are monosyllabic: :.kal. → Kal :.tl. → Tl :.ä. → A :.chi. → Ci :.hua. → Ua ''ächihuacalli'' → ACiUaKalTl HISTORICAL TRANSCRIPTION When the Spanish friars began transcribing Nahuatl into the Roman alphabet they, naturally, made use of the Spanish language practices as a basis for the Nahuatl script. In doing this, they faced the following problems: (Spanish did have the alveo-palatal fricative č (English (Spanish did have at the time the alveo-palatal fricative š (English
This presented no problem for the following consonants, which sounded the same in both Spanish and Nahuatl: /p/ /t/ /k/ Thus, Nahuatl written in Roman script is pronounced as if it were Spanish with a few exceptions.
Before the conquest, there existed differences between the Nahuatl of the people, and the Nahuatl of the upper classes. The upper classes had created an esoteric language; for example, the word Aztlan means "the place of the storks". But Stork means "white", and white means "the origin", so in the language of the upper classes, Aztlan means "the place of origin". This has complicated the translation of the surviving Aztec writings. Since the time of the Spanish conquest the spelling of Nahuatl has varied considerably.
Recently, US linguists working with modern Nahuatl have sometimes preferred spellings that look more like English. Thus:
In some unusual cases, non-ASCII symbols are used for TL, CH, CU/UC, and TZ to stress that these are single consonants, not compounds. |
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