I have a set of articles coming out exploring the early history of Nahuan. Today one of them came out in a volume on language contact before the written record, traced through early loanwords: Beyond Recorded History: Unlocking the Past Through Contact Linguistics, edited by Marwan Kilani and Rasmus G. Bjørn (De Gruyter Mouton, 2026). All the chapters are open access.
My chapter, “Early Mesoamerican Language Contact and Lexical Borrowing Involving Nahuatl”, looks at early borrowings into and out of proto-Nahua and pre-Nahua. I revise the loanwords Kaufman proposed from Mesoamerican languages into proto-Nahua. On closer inspection most of them turn out to have strong internal etymologies, and are either chance similarities or borrowings in the opposite direction:
- Of the 16 borrowings Kaufman proposed from Mixe-Zoque into proto-Nahua, only 3 are in fact likely borrowings (and not necessarily directly from a Mixe-Zoque source).
- Of the 8 proposed Téenek borrowings, only 4 hold up (the rest are either not borrowings or are local borrowings only into Huasteca Nahuatl). This suggests some contact with Téenek speakers, though not necessarily intense.
- Of the 19 proposed Totonac borrowings, 8 are in fact likely, suggesting significant contact.
Kaufman considered Otopamean loans all but absent in Nahuan, but I demonstrate 8 likely loans from an early Uto-Aztecan language (perhaps proto-Corachol or pre-Nahua) into proto-Otomian, and 9 going the other way, from Otomian into pre-Nahua or proto-Corachol. This points to significant contact between pre-Nahuas and proto-Otomians, and locates early Otopameans somewhat northwest of where we usually place them.
The conclusion is that proto-Nahua developed in contact with speakers of Otopamean and Totonacan languages, and had light contact with early Téenek speakers — but not with Mixe-Zoqueans.
Leave a comment