The artistic verbal expression of the native inhabitants of the pre‑Hispanic Mesoamerica presented great variety of forms, among which there could be distinguished, for example, solemn speeches, ritual songs and even very complex performances, that could be compared to some forms of the European theatre. Most of these pieces were destroyed with the conquest and colonization of America. Some of them, however, survived, mainly thanks to the effort that some missionaries and their indigenous students made to register parts of the native oral tradition in the alphabetic writing. The present article presents chosen problems related with the translation of this kind of texts, one of the most important difficulties being a huge distance in time and space that separates the source and the target cultures.
Almost 500 years of constant contact with the Spanish language have influenced Mexican indigenous languages and their speakers in many different ways, and Nahuatl language makes here no exception. Apart from code-switching and massive borrowings (that include, for instance, core vocabulary and function morphemes), the convergence processes can be clearly found in many modern varieties of Nahuatl language as a step that can be observed next to a process of language shift. The present contribution investigates and examines the convergence process in Nahuatl language within the 4-M model (described in detail in Myers-Scotton & Jake 2000) in order to test the claim that this model can be applied to different kinds of contact language phenomena other than code-switching. This model distinguishes four morpheme types which do not participate equally in language contact phenomena. Some of them, for example, show retention, while others easily undergo an external change. The investigation discussed in the article was carried out in the city of San Sebastian Zinacatepec which is situated in southeastern Puebla in Mexico.
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The extensive corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts lights on almost every sphere of colonial life and cross‑cultural interactions between the Europeans/Spaniards and the indigenous world. This corpus contains rich language data related to contact‑induced change that reveal a simultaneous, prolonged use of neologisms and loanwords, a widespread “Nahuatlization” of foreign terms as well as adoption of Spanish ideas and cultural stereotypes. The linguistic phenomena discussed in the present paper focus on lexical change, neologization, meaning change, borrowing and the creation of calques. These language innovations reveal the nuances of the complex process of cross‑cultural translation, the receptivity of European influence, the domestication of the new and the survival of traditional language resources.
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