NaWaTL · Narrative, Writing, and the Teotihuacan Language: Exploring Language History Through Phylogenetics, Epigraphy and Iconography

Narrative, Writing, and the Teotihuacan Language: Exploring Language History Through Phylogenetics, Epigraphy and Iconography

The ancient city of Teotihuacan remains one of the major mysteries in the study of the Mesoamerican classic period, and as the country’s most visited tourist destination it looms large as an emblem of Mexican history. We know little of the people who inhabited this ancient metropolis which flourished from approximately 150-500 CE. They had a writing system, but scholars have been unable to begin deciphering it, because we have not identified the likely language spoken by the Teotihuacano people. Many have suggested that an early form of the Nahuatl language, the language spoken by the Aztecs 1000 years after the fall of Teotihuacan as a potential candidate. But because we have not had enough knowledge of the early history of Nahuatl to be able to say whether they were present in the Valley of Mexico during the heyday of Teotihuacan. This was the question which the NaWaTL project, sought to answer: When and from where did the linguistic forebears of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs arrive in Central Mexico, and might they have had a role in the development of the metropolis of Teotihuacan? The study combines linguistic dialectology (the study of the geographical distribution of variant linguistic forms) with epigraphy (the study of ancient writing systems), to come closer to knowledge about the language spoken by the ancient people of Teotihuacan. The objectives of the project were: 1. To create a digital database of Nahuan languages (all the languages that are closely related to Nahuatl), which can be used for studying the historical relations between the different Nahuan varieites and how they dispersed throughout Mexico and Mesoamerica. By analyzing the patterns of the distributions of the different varieties, we could find clues about when Nahuas arrived in Central Mexico, and whether they could have been present at Teotihuacan. 2. To study the writing system of Teotihuacan to look for clues that might point at a possible candidate language, and which might support or contradict the possibility of the Teotihuacan language being related to Nahuatl or not. 3. To combine the results from the linguistic analysis of Nahuan dialect distribution with the results from the epigraphic analysis of Teotihuacan writing, to give an overall evaluation of the likelihood that Teotihuacan writing represents an early or ancestral form of Nahuatl.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз