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The Aztec writing system derives from writing systems used in Central Mexico, such as Zapotec script. Mixtec writing is also thought to descend from Zapotec. The first Oaxacan inscriptions are thought to encode Zapotec, partially because of numerical suffixes characteristic of the Zapotec languages.
Traditionally, Pre-Columbian Aztec writing has not been considered a true writing system, since it did not represent the full vocabulary of a spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the Old World or the Maya Script did. Therefore, generally Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told.
On the question of geographic point of origin, 20th-century linguists agreed that the Yutonahua language family originated in the Southwestern United States. [5] [6] The Uto-Aztecan family has been accepted by linguists as a linguistic family since the beginning of the same century, and six subgroups are generally accepted as valid: Numic, Takic, Pimic, Taracahita, Corachol, and Aztecan.
Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican Codices through the medium of Aztec Hieroglyphs) and Colonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in the Latin Alphabet), is a set of variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century ...
The colonial-era codices often contain Aztec pictograms or other pictorial elements. Later indigenous literature employed Latin script exclusively, e.g., the Books of Chilam Balam that date from the 17th c. onwards. Already by the mid-16th c., use of the Latin script for Mesoamerican languages seems to have been well established. [22]
Aztec codices (Nahuatl languages: Mēxihcatl āmoxtli Nahuatl pronunciation: [meːˈʃiʔkatɬ aːˈmoʃtɬi], sing. codex ) are Mesoamerican manuscripts made by the pre-Columbian Aztec , and their Nahuatl -speaking descendants during the colonial period in Mexico .
The Uto-Aztecan [a] languages [b] are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ancestry of the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages (also known as Aztecan) of ...
These early grammars of native languages systematized the reading and writing of indigenous languages in their own time and help us understand them today. The most widely known early grammars and dictionaries are of the Aztec language, Nahuatl. Famous examples are the works written by Alonso de Molina and Andrés de Olmos. But also Mayan and ...