Who Wrote Down the Nahua Voice
An elder speaks a formal speech, slowly, in the old high style. A young Nahua scholar writes it down in alphabetic Nahuatl. Somewhere nearby, a friar will have a shorter Spanish version made. KTT counts what the elder says about thinking as thoughts, noticed or not, and asks how much of them survives the writing. The sources read for this article describe the book and its readings. They did not test whether the Nahuatl text records thought as it was held before the conquest.
The book
The Florentine Codex was finished in Tlatelolco between 1575 and 1577. A team of Nahua authors and artists made it together with the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. It has twelve books, about 2,000 painted images, and pages with two columns: Nahuatl on one side, and a Spanish version that is shorter. The Getty, which publishes it online, presents it as a Tlatelolca book written mostly by Nahua authors. Scholars used to call it Sahagún’s work. In 1577 King Philip II of Spain ordered all its copies seized.
Book 6 holds the huehuetlahtolli, “the speech of the ancients,” gathered from Nahua elders around 1547. Sahagún called them the rhetoric, moral philosophy and theology of the Mexican people.
The wise one
Book 10 describes the tlamatini, a wise person. In an English translation of Book 10, the wise one is a light, a torch that does not smoke, a mirror pierced on both sides. He puts a mirror before others, and he causes a face to appear on them. In ixtli in yollotl, “the face and the heart,” names what a person grows into. Miguel León-Portilla, writing in 1963, read it as the character of a person. Yollotl, the heart, is said to derive from ollin, movement.
The thought in that passage is not a stored opinion. It is a person being shaped, with a teacher holding up a mirror.
Whose reading
León-Portilla read the tlamatini as a philosopher. Other scholars, among them Boone and Johansson, read the figure as a religious specialist or a craftsman. The Nahuatl text itself carries more than one possible reading.
What is not known
Whether the Book 10 description records how thinking was understood before 1521, or how Nahua scholars described it in a sixteenth-century colonial school, is not known. The two cannot easily be separated.
How much the Spanish column bent the Nahuatl is not known either, though the Nahuatl is longer and was written first.
Whether in ixtli in yollotl names a thought, a character, or both is also open.