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Chapter 12. Nahuatl L2 texts from Northern Nueva Galicia

Indigenous language contact in the seventeenth century
  • Rosa H. Yáñez Rosales
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Abstract

This chapter examines texts written in Nahuatl by indigenous scribes whose first language was not Nahuatl. The texts come from locations in two different regions in Nueva Galicia, which was the political unit located in west and northwest New Spain: Los Altos must have had Guachichil inhabitants (one of the Chichimec groups), whereas the Sierra Madre Occidental must have had Cora (Uto-Aztecan) inhabitants. The interferences in the documents are phonological as well as morphological and differ in each group of documents.The objective of this chapter is to provide information about linguistic contact between native Mesoamerican languages since contact among them has been only scarcely documented, and to provide information about the uses of Nahuatl as a second language throughout a region whose linguistic past is still being reconstructed.

Abstract

This chapter examines texts written in Nahuatl by indigenous scribes whose first language was not Nahuatl. The texts come from locations in two different regions in Nueva Galicia, which was the political unit located in west and northwest New Spain: Los Altos must have had Guachichil inhabitants (one of the Chichimec groups), whereas the Sierra Madre Occidental must have had Cora (Uto-Aztecan) inhabitants. The interferences in the documents are phonological as well as morphological and differ in each group of documents.The objective of this chapter is to provide information about linguistic contact between native Mesoamerican languages since contact among them has been only scarcely documented, and to provide information about the uses of Nahuatl as a second language throughout a region whose linguistic past is still being reconstructed.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Contributors xi
  5. Abbreviations and acronyms xiii
  6. Dedication xv
  7. Chapter 1. Language contact in Mesoamerica and beyond 1
  8. Chapter 2. Spanish influence in two Tepehua languages 29
  9. Chapter 3. Spanish infinitives borrowed into Zapotec light verb constructions 55
  10. Chapter 4. The effect of external factors on the perception of sounds in Meꞌphaa 81
  11. Chapter 5. Sociolinguistic factors in loanword prosody 105
  12. Chapter 6. Some grammatical characteristics of the Spanish spoken by Lacandón and Mazahua bilinguals 125
  13. Chapter 7. Spanish loanwords in Amerindian languages and their implications for the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Spanish in Mesoamerica 155
  14. Chapter 8. Loanword evidence for dialect mixing in colonial American Spanish 171
  15. Chapter 9. The impact of language contact in Nahuatl couplets 187
  16. Chapter 10. Spanish–Huastec (Mayan) 16th-century language contact attested in the Doctrina Christiana en la lengua guasteca by Friar Juan de la Cruz, 1571 209
  17. Chapter 11. Historical review of loans in Chichimec (c.1767–2012) 229
  18. Chapter 12. Nahuatl L2 texts from Northern Nueva Galicia 237
  19. Chapter 13. Western and Central Nahua dialects 263
  20. Chapter 14. Loanwords in Apachean from indigenous languages of the Southwest 301
  21. Chapter 15. Language contact across the Andes 319
  22. Chapter 16. The Mesoamerican linguistic area revisited 335
  23. Chapter 17. Language diversity, contact and change in the Americas 355
  24. Chapter 18. Spanish in the Americas 385
  25. Index of subjects and terms 419
  26. Index of authors 425
  27. Index of place, person and ethnic group names 427
  28. Index of languages 429
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