There is a slight admixture of Aztec words in Cakchiquel. The names of one or two of their months, of certain objects of barter, and of a few social institutions, are evidently loan-words from that tongue. There are also some proper names, both personal and geographical, which are clearly of Nahuatl derivation. But, putting all these together, they form but a very small fraction of the language, not more than we can readily understand they would necessarily have borrowed from a nation with whom, as was the case with the Aztecs, they were in constant commercial communication for centuries.[1] The Pipils, their immediate neighbors to the South, cultivating the hot and fertile slope which descends from the central plateau to the Pacific Ocean, were an Aztec race of pure blood, speaking a dialect of Nahuatl, very little different from that heard in the schools of classic Tezcuco.[2]But the grammatical structure and stem-words of the Cakchiquel remained absolutely uninfluenced by this association.
Later, when the Spanish occupation had brought with it
- ↑ Herrera observes of the natives of Guatemala, that the Nahuatl tongue was understood among them, though not in use between themselves. "Corre entre ellos la lengua Mexicana, aunque la tienen particular." Historia de las Indias Occidentales, Dec. IV, Lib. VIII, Cap. VIII.
- ↑ I have in my possession the only grammar of this dialect probably ever written: Arte de la Lengua Vulgar Mexicana de Guatemala, MS., in a handwriting of the eighteenth century, without name of author.
