The polysynthetic Aztecan language spoken by an indigenous people of Mexico.
Used in a Sentence
nahuatl
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for nahuatl.
Editorial note
It came as some surprise that Inchtuthil was not a Nahuatl place name.
Examples18
Definitions2
Parts of speech1
Quick take
The polysynthetic Aztecan language spoken by an indigenous people of Mexico.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of nahuatl gathered in one view.
A member of a group of people indigenous to the Central Mexico region spanning multiple tribal groups including the Aztecs.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for nahuatl.
noun
The polysynthetic Aztecan language spoken by an indigenous people of Mexico.
noun
A member of a group of people indigenous to the Central Mexico region spanning multiple tribal groups including the Aztecs.
Example sentences
It came as some surprise that Inchtuthil was not a Nahuatl place name.
The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec.
> relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers Nahuatl is actually a colonizer language.
We do have a reasonable Nahuatl corpus, and it remains a (very minor) spoken language, so if it is such, there's a good chance it could be understood.
It has a lot of duplicate words for the same reason modern Nahuatl has a lot of loanwords from Spanish: England was colonized and ruled for centuries by non-English-speaking people.
(Apologies if the Nahuatl is wrong – I just used Google translate.) ¿Uelis techmakas se neskayotl tlen se programa tlen amo ouij tlen ueliskia nijchiuas ipan se navegador web?
Somebody can learn Nahuatl or whatever out of interest, but if they don't speak it to their kids (and make kids speak it between themselves), it will end with this very person.
The following is what happens if I ask Claude Code in Nahuatl to give me an example of a simple program that I can execute inside a web browser (avoiding any direct keyword prompts like 'Javascript' or 'Hello World').
Quite a few of my classmates from my school district studied interesting languages like Arabic and ancient Nahuatl and linguistics while in university, and several aspired to become, and at least one became, foreign service officers.
There was a public notice board in the central plaza where all notices were posted -- ten miles from the denser parts of Mexico City -- in Nahuatl -- the original Aztec tongue -- as well as Spanish.
I am also interested to see what comes of this, but it's been pointed out that is paper is somewhat suspect with seemingly little input from Nahuatl language experts or prior literature on the Voynich manuscript.
Quote examples
If you're going for phonetic correctness, Mexico should be pronounced "Meshi-co" according to the original Nahuatl.
Actually better is the book "The Fifth Sun: A new history of the Aztecs" written in Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and translated by Camille Townsend.
No Mexican would call them “axolotl” (a Nahuatl word).
How about the popular fruit with a vulgar name > The English word "avocado" comes from the Spanish word aguacate, which comes from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ahuacatl.
Proper noun examples
If it is Nahuatl, it should be possible to decipher a lot of it pretty quickly.
Nahuatl has very regular morphology which will give repeating patterns that can be used to decipher the letter, assuming they're phonetic.
There are several non-standardized Latinesque orthographies we know (see Carochi) for Nahuatl, so it's a known phenomenon.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use nahuatl in a sentence?
It came as some surprise that Inchtuthil was not a Nahuatl place name.
What does nahuatl mean?
The polysynthetic Aztecan language spoken by an indigenous people of Mexico.
What part of speech is nahuatl?
nahuatl is commonly used as noun.