I've fallen down the rabbit hole again

[aryanhwy]

Nahuatl is so cool.

For the last week or so I've been working on the christening records from the parish of San José in Tula de Allende, Hildago, between 1590 and 1599. The names are so cool. I'm about halfway through transcribing the data. The vast majority of the given names are ordinary classic Spanish Christian names (the only one that I don't immediately identify so far is feminine Aboronia, which was a Spanish _word_ in 1809, though whether it was native, I don't yet know). The bynames, on the other hand, are some classic Spanish, but most, I'd say about 3/4 but I won't know for sure until I've transcribed all the data, are Nahuatl: Lots and lots of x's. And y's. And u's. Whee! I have been alternating between transcribing and sorting/entering, so there's already a draft available. I have made some small headway into identifying the bynames, and what's cool is that many of the Nahuatl bynames of the mothers appear to be literal descriptives. There are a number which mean things like 'woman', 'oldest daughter', 'last daughter', 'third daughter', etc. And then there are bynames deriving from flora and fauna, which are quite lovely.

I have found relatively little research out there on Nahuatl personal names; jstor gave up very few references and most of the papers I downloaded this afternoon have been irrelevant for my purposes. I have found an on-line translation (into English) of Bernardino de Sahagún's Nahuatl dictionary, which has certainly helped things. If I can find information about a sufficient percentage of the bynames, I'm seriously thinking of turning this into something I could submit to, say, Nomina or Onoma.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Nahuatl was the lingua franca of medieval Mesoamerica. It was the common language of, e.g., the Aztec Empire. Tula de Allende was the center of a large pre-Aztec civilization, and continue to be important when they took over, and when the Spanish arrived, around 1546 they established a monastery there. It's the christening records from that monastery that I'm looking at; it is so cool see such blatant evidence of mixed language names. I'm really hoping that (a) I can find records from the same monastery from early decades and (b) a nice history of the monastery, because I'd love to see what kind of info I can find about population percentages -- how many were native, how many were Spanish imports, how many of the Spanish imports were women, etc.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

That is cool. Can you count this as work? I know you do stuff involving logic somehow, does history of naming practice also count? Or is this part "only" a hobby?

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Right now, it's only a hobby. But with 15+ years experiences underneath my belt, include 2 years as the top onomastics officer in a world-wide organization devoted to the study of the Middle Ages :), I really hope to someday turn this into "real" research. I'm seriously considering pitching an "introduction to onomastics" course for the master's in transcultural studies that my cluster organizes.