§ 4 Prosody of the Songs
The assertion is advanced by Boturini that the genuine ancient Nahuatl poetry which has been preserved is in iambic metre, and he refers to a song of Nezahualcoyotl in his collection to prove his opinion. What study I have given to the prosody of the Nahuatl tongue leads me to doubt the correctness of so sweeping a statement. The vocalic elements of the language have certain peculiarities which prevent its poetry from entering unencumbered into the domain of classical prosody.
The quantity of Nahuatl syllables is a very important element in the pronunciation of the tongue, but their quantity is not confined, as in Latin, to long, short, and common. The Nahuatl vowels are long, short, intermediate, and “with stress,” or as the Spanish grammarians say, “with a jump,” con saltillo. The last mentioned is peculiar to this tongue. The vowel so designated is pronounced with a momentary suspension or catching of the breath, rendering it emphatic.
These quantities are prominent features in the formal portions of the language, characterizing inflections and declinations. No common means of designating them have been adopted by the grammarians, and for my present purpose, I shall make use of the following signs:—
| ă | , | short. |
| a | , | intermediate |
| ā | , | long. |
| â | , | with stress. |
The general prosodic rules are:—
1. In polysyllabic words in which there are no long vowels, all the vowels are intermediate.
2. The vowels are long in the penultimate of the plurals of the imperatives when the preterit of the verb ends in a vowel; the ā of the cān of the imperatives; the ī of the tī; of the gerundives; the last vowel of the futures when the verb loses a vowel to form them; the penultimates of passives in lo, of impersonals, of verbals in oni, illi, olli and oca, of verbal nouns with the terminations yan and can; the ō of abstract nouns in otl in composition; and those derived from long syllables.
3. Vowels are “with stress” when they are the finals in the plurals of nouns and verbs, also in the perfect preterite, in possessives ending in â, ê, ô, and in the penultimate of nouns ending in tli, tla and tle when these syllables are immediately preceded by the vowel.22
The practical importance of these distinctions may be illustrated by the following examples:—
| tâtli | , | father. |
| tātlĭ | , | thou drinkest. |
| tātlî | , | we drink. |
It is, however, evident from this example that the quantity of Nahuatl syllables enters too much into the strictly formal part of the language for rules of position, such as some of those above given, to be binding; and doubtless for this reason the eminent grammarian Carlos de Tapia Zenteno, who was professor of the tongue in the University of Mexico, denies that it can be reduced to definite rules of prosody like those of the Latin. 23
Substituting accent for quantity, there would seem to be an iambic character to the songs. Thus the first words of Song I, were probably chanted:—
Nino’ yolno’ notza’ campa’ nicŭ iz’ yec tli’ ahui aca’ xochitl’: etc.
But the directions given for the drums at the beginning of Songs XVIII, XIX, etc., do not indicate a continuance of these feet, but of others, as in XIX:—
u—, u—, u—, uu—, u—, u—, u—, etc.
Indeed, we may suppose that the metre varied with the subject and the skill of the poet. This, in fact, is the precise statement of Father Duran,24 who speaks of the native poets as “giving to each song a different tune (sonada), as we are accustomed in our poetry to have the sonnet, the octava rima and the terceto.”