Mexican X Part XI: Rise of a New X
Many of the entries in my Mexican X series have dealt with how indigenous “sh” sounds (represented by the letter “x”) either survived or didn’t in Mexican Spanish.
But today I want to flip the script and talk about what Spanish sounds did to Nahuatl. Along the way, we’ll see how the disappearance of one sort of “x” was balanced by the birth of a whole new set of them.
It’s fascinating what you can confirm about 16th-century Spanish through loanwords in Colonial Nahuatl.
For example, Spaniards were called “Caxtiltēcah” or “inhabitants of Caxtillān.”
Does that word seem familiar? It’s derived from “Castilla.” In Nahuatl, some place names end with the suffix -tlān (“place of”) or its variant -lān (which you find after roots ending in -l).
Examples abound: Tōllān, Cōātlān, Cocollān, Huīpīllān, etc.
To the Nahua ear, “Castilla” sounded like a -lan place name, just clumsily pronounced by weird, stinky foreigners.
So why “Caxtillān” and not “Caztillān”? (Keep in mind that “z” represents /s/ in Mexican Spanish and Nahuatl.)
Maybe because 16th-century Spanish “s” was apical (pronounced with tip of the tongue). If you’ve heard people from Spain speak, you’ll know that some dialects have an “s” that almost sounds like…
