The Virgin’s Nahuatl

The most well-known words in Nahuatl were not pronounced by an indigenous person at all.

Instead, they were purportedly spoken by Mary herself, the mother of Jesus, when she appeared for the fourth time to a man named Juan Diego Cuāuhtlahtoātzin near the hill of Tepēyac.

The story goes that the Virgin had begun appearing to Juan Diego on December 9th, urging him to get Bishop Zumárraga to build a chapel upon that hill (where a Nahua goddess had been worshiped for centuries).

Having failed, Juan Diego tried to avoid Mary’s apparition on the morning of December 12, 1531.

But she found him, purportedly, and gently chided him with a string of lovely Nahuatl phrases that I want to deconstruct, if you’re willing to follow along with me.

“Cuix ahmo nicān nicah nimonāntzin?” she began.

“Am I, your beloved mother, not here?”

Let me break down the Nahuatl for you:

• “Cuix” is sentence particle indicating a question.
• “Ahmo” is the adverb “no/not.”
• “Nicān” is the adverb “here.”
• “Nicah” is made up of the singular first-person subject prefix “ni-” (“I”) and the verb “cah” (“to physically be somewhere”).
• “Nimonāntzin” contains that same “ni-” plus “mo-” (possessive prefix meaning “your”), “nān-” (“mother”), and the reverential suffix “-tzin” (“beloved”).