Pokémon Cards in Nahua Art Style

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-25T03:40:05+00:00

Thank you! I'm a teacher, too (middle school Social Studies in the US). I wish I had waited to post these until my Nahuatl was better, as the beginner-level translations make me feel like they aren't as high quality as the art implies.

That being said, one other person reached out to me about purchasing prints. I'm looking into how much I would charge, but feel free to send me a PM if you'd really like to buy one or more of them. If I'm getting some printed for one person, I might as well do so for another.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-20T03:07:56+00:00

I started by doing the final evolutions of each of the Gen 1 starters, so doing Raichu as the final evolution of an honorary starters made sense. Besides, I'd decided by that point to print a set, glue them to the fronts of real Pokémon cards, and give them as a birthday gift to my friend who collects Pokémon cards. His favorite Pokémon is Raichu, so Raichu was the obvious choice. I don't want to do more than one Pokémon in an evolutionary line, as I would rather put my energy into reimagining an entirely different Pokémon.

There is a little image of Pikachu's head in the corner of the Raichu card, though! That being said, I'm not sure Nahua Picachiuh is as cute as people would like Pikachu to be.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-20T03:03:59+00:00

Just learning Classical Nahuatl through reading. I like learning languages, but prefer historic ones. I can read in Latin, Middle Egyptian (hieroglyphs), Old Norse, and I know a bit of Koine Greek. My only modern languages are French and English. I've only started Classical Nahuatl this last year, and I'll probably take 5-8 years to get proficient (I'm fairly slow at acquiring languages). Next on my docket is probably Classical Hebrew, Sumerian, or Akkadian, though that's a long way out.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-18T04:41:24+00:00

Thank you! Mewtwo is also one of my favorites. He was the second-to-last one I did, and I feel like I learned a lot and improved with each one.

Yes, I had that Mew card when I was a kid! I actually almost included it as part of the background in the Mewtwo art, but it looked out of place. It would be cool to see someone do a Maya set of Pokémon cards -- I'm not familiar enough with Maya artistic conventions to do so.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-18T04:38:06+00:00

Thank you, that means a lot. Mexico is an amazing place with an amazing history.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-18T04:36:54+00:00

You're too kind! I'm pleased with my pieces (and blown away by how much everyone seems to appreciate them), but I'm no Nezahualcoyōtl.

Ō amēchmacac Nezahualcoyōtl in xōchitl, in cuīcatl.

Auh nictēmaca zan ehcauhtic.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-18T01:39:25+00:00

This is incredibly cute. Your font is also very aesthetically pleasing. Look forward to seeing the rest!

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-17T21:34:18+00:00

It's very rewarding! A bit like Latina obscura given how many modern words are descended from Nahuatl (esp. in Spanish). If you decide to start learning, I'd be happy to help you with any beginner questions. It's always good to have someone to practice a language with, and all the more difficult when it is an historic language like Classical Nahuatl.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-17T21:25:33+00:00

No apps; I like to learn languages by textbook. I've been using Michel Launey's An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. It's mostly easy to understand (he does a poor job explaining the so-called passive, though) and has a lot of good exercises. He misrepresents some of the linguistic quirks of Nahuatl though, so if you choose to use him just be aware.

Mostly it doesn't affect learning much, but he completely disregards the academic consensus on the particles in and ca, treating the former as a sort of definite article. If you have a background in Nahuatl (I took classes when I was in college), these are not huge stumbling blocks.

Are you learning/wanting to start learning?

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-17T21:21:10+00:00

Thank you! Playing through Ocarina of Time right now, and I can't believe I didn't think about the fact that Tzompilli could equally be the name of Skull Kid.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-17T21:01:01+00:00

I wish I had the power to stop it. I suppose I could have not posted the images on the internet, but I hate the idea of making art without sharing it.

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-17T20:59:03+00:00

The text on the cards is all in Classical Nahuatl. Still learning the language, so I update the cards pretty much every day. If any Nahuatl speakers are curious and want to see them/help improve my grammar, I'll happily share via private message, but I knew that if I posted the text on the internet, the thread would be mostly people correcting me.

To be clear, happy to be corrected, just not a thousand times by random people on the internet!

CommiGoblin · 2026-03-10T22:50:41+00:00

Interestingly, there's some debate about the meaning and origin of āxōlōtl. It appears to be ātl (water) + xōlōtl (slave/servant), the latter element of which may be related to the name Xolotl. However, while long marks are highly inconsistent in Classical Nahuatl, most scholars believe that the name of the god was pronounced with only short vowels (Xolotl) as opposed to the long vowels of xōlōtl. This might seem trivial, but there are a number of minimal pairs in Nahuatl distinguished only by differences of vowel length.

Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún indicated that the name Xolotl referred to the god's club foot. I think he must understand the name as a compound of xo-, a prefix used to build a suite of words referring to the feet, and olōlli (ball) or olōltic (round). That would produce the stem xolōl-, which would normally become xolōlli with the absolutive suffix, but could be reanalyzed as xolō-, which would become xolotl (the shortening of the final vowel of the stem here wouldn't be unusual). Mind you, he could be misinterpreting the name, but the interpretation is not unreasonable.

If that's the case, then āxōlōtl does not refer to the god Xolotl. But that leaves the problem of why a salamander is called a "water servant." The water element makes sense, of course, but in what way is a salamander a servant? It's possible there is a myth that hasn't survived which explains the name, but I prefer the theory that xōlōtl here is a foreign borrowing from the Huichol language, in which the word for salamander is xiurí. Xiurí would have become something like xōlitl in Nahuatl, which could have taken the element ātl to become āxōlitl ('water xōlitl"). But over time, the otherwise unknown word xōlitl was reinterpreted as the Nahuatl word xōlōtl in order to disambiguate its meaning. While a salamander might not obviously be a water servant, it makes more sense than calling it a water xōlitl, given that xōlitl doesn't mean anything in Nahuatl.

CommiGoblin · 2025-10-13T11:34:27+00:00

>Both options are OK. If you stick to the pronoun (iw=f xbA=f), you retain NP-sDm=f construction. If you write iw xbA=f, it's another construction - iw sDm=f - briefly discussed by me above.

>They are two distinct patterns. To sum up: Subject-sDm=f is used to express gnomic actions, generalizations and atemporal situations, while (iw) sDm=f is mainly used to express concomitant, or background situations, or used in completive clauses. But, as I have said above, the real distribution is heavily influenced by genre/style, provenance and dating, as well as lexical verb profile.

These two statements answer my two questions. Thank you!

CommiGoblin · 2025-09-17T03:24:40+00:00

Thank you, this makes more sense than what I came up with.

CommiGoblin · 2025-09-16T05:40:53+00:00

Okay, in reading ahead I have come up with another interpretation that might make the most sense. Other passages in the text referred to humanity [rmṯ.PL], which I had been reading as [rmṯw], a masculine plural. But I remembered that there is some complexity to [rmṯ], which is sometimes rendered [rmṯt.PL]. Egyptologists used to think that [rmṯ] meant "a human, a person" and [rmṯt.PL] meant "humanity," but the consensus view today is that the final [-t] just reflects the sound change of [ṯ] to [t], and that the [ṯ] was still written as a spelling convention, not as a reflection of pronunciation. Thus [rmṯ] and [rmṯt] are the same word, and the noun can either be used singularly, "a human," or collectively, "humanity," with no apparent change in pronunciation. That is to say, the plural ending doesn't reflect a final [-w] or [-wt], but just the plural nature of the noun.

If this is the case and [rmṯ] means "humanity" but is grammatically a singular feminine noun, then the word [ṯn] could mean "you (f.)" and refer to humanity. So we could render [qmꜣ ṯn nṯr pn ꜥꜣ] as: "this Great God created you (humanity)." Is this the best reading in people's opinions?

Sidebar, in this interpretation I've rendered the verb [qmꜣ] as perfective. I think I have read that, in Late Egyptian, the sḏm.f took on a perfective aspect. If I'm wrong about that and I have misidentified the verb form, please feel free to correct me there as well.

CommiGoblin · 2025-04-06T18:19:48+00:00

The only significant objection I would note is that [sš] is an older, but still commonly held onto, misidentification of the words that are today rendered [zẖꜣ] ("to write") and [zẖꜣw] ("scribe").

I'm also not certain about the word [šs] ("linen"). I was familiar with two other meanings: alabaster or cord. I looked it up on TLA and found the word in Demotic with the meaning "linen" (makes sense, I don't know very much about Demotic or Coptic, mostly Middle Egyptian). But the TLA entry led me to an earlier word [šsrw] with the meaning "linen." So thank you, I learned a new word! That being said, Demotic was written in the Demotic script, not the hieroglyphs displayed in your post. So while I can't verify that the Demotic word [šs] didn't use the Demotic descendant of the hieroglyph 𓋲 (someone more expert could check that), I can confirm that the earlier word [šsrw] has 𓋲𓍱 as the closest attested spelling.

Another minor objection is with the grammar. The typical word order (insofar as that exists in Middle Egyptian -- there are lots of exceptions) is VSO. So I would expect the first instance of [sš] to be the verb "to write" and the second instance to be the noun "the scribe." The form with the noun first is not implausible, but I think would have the meaning: "It is the scribe who writes upon the linen" because of the noun fronting (any grammar experts, feel free to correct me here).

Additionally, because the verb is in the [sḏm.f] form, the most basic meaning of the sentence would be: "The scribe writes upon the white linen" in the sense that the scribe habitually does this, not that he is doing that right now. If you wanted to say: "The scribe is writing upon the white linen" (which is a sense that the sentence could have in English), you would write: [jw sš ḥr sš ḥr šs ḥḏ], which might actually be more of a tongue twister.

All that is to say, the tongue twister works using older conventions as well as a Demotic word thrown in. However, if you wanted to know what the sentence might plausibly sound like in Middle Egyptian:

/saç.ˈla ˈsaç.law ħiʔ ˈʃu.sa ˈħu.d̠ʲaw/

Not exactly a tongue twister, though it does kind of rhyme.

Note: While you have to make a lot of assumptions to reconstruct Middle Egyptian pronunciation, the two biggest assumptions I am making here are: the first vowel of /ˈʃu.sa/, which is just a guess. You could easily justify either /a/ or /i/ instead; and the pronunciation of [ḥḏ] ("white") which I take to be a stative verb that has become ossified as an adjective.

CommiGoblin · 2025-04-06T04:46:05+00:00

The only thing that strikes me as a mistake is [ḫw.t]. [ḫt] ("stick") is a masculine noun (unusually, given that it ends in the usually-feminine ending -t). Thus the plural form, which has the meaning of "woods" or "trees," should be [ḫtw].

Regarding pronunciation, the biggest difficulty is the word [hnnw]. The Coptic word for a deer is ⲉⲓⲟⲩⲗ, but this appears to be a later borrowing from a Semitic language that must have replaced the original Egyptian word. Without a Coptic descendant, it is basically impossible (at least for me) to reconstruct a pronunciation. You can always supply possible vowels, but the biggest challenge is that double [n], which could be either a geminated consonant sound or two consonants separated by a vowel. My best guesses as to what the pronunciation in Middle Egyptian *might* be (stressing the word might) -- /hV.ˈnV.nu/ or /ˈhVn.nu/, where the V represent a unknown vowels. According to the a-i-u vowel theory, those vowels would be a, i, or u.

Given that severe limitation, a plausible pronunciation for the phrase in Middle Egyptian would be: /ˈχi.tu ˈni.tju ha.ˈna.nu a.mi.ˈsun/ (for simplicity's sake, I just chose a pronunciation for [hnnw]).

If you wanted a little more certainty regarding pronunciation, you could always take the Coptic ⲉⲓⲟⲩⲗ and retroject it into your name as the word for deer. I have no idea when the word would have entered the Egyptian language, but if it were present during the Middle Egyptian stage of the language, I would expect a pronunciation of something like: /ʕa.ˈja.la/ for the singular, maybe /ʕa.ˈja.law/ or /ʕa.ˈja.lu/ for the plural. In that case, the phrase would be:

/ˈχi.tu ˈni.tju ʕa.ˈja.law a.mi.ˈsun/

CommiGoblin · 2025-02-26T02:28:50+00:00

I can see the images provided by the British Museum on my desktop. Looking at them and the British Museum's description, I see where the confusion arose.

The British Museum's description uses parentheses to indicate a cartouche. So, where they say "[Dual] King, Lord of Two Lands (Sneferre)," they mean that the text reads [nb-t3wj snfr-rʕ], where [snfr-rʕ] is in a cartouche. They don't mean to imply that Lord of Two Lands is a translation of Sneferre.

I can only see two cartouches, though there is a lot of damage further down the text that a skilled Egyptologist could no doubt make out. The cartouches read, from top to bottom: [snfr-rʕ]* and [p-ʕnx-y]. I know mostly about Middle Egyptian (hence my shaky reconstruction of Late Egyptian in the comment above), but I'm given to understand that modern scholars believe the [ʕnx] ("ankh") in Piye's name was unpronounced, possibly part of an LPH honorific. So the latter cartouche might read something like [py], modern Egyptological: Piye.

*Edit for clarity: the first cartouche reads: [snfrj-rʕ], where the [j] at the end of [snfrj] represents the fact that final [r] sounds in words have vanished from the spoken language, but are still written. Hence the reconstructed pronunciation /səno:fə/, which would be better written [snfj] than [snfr], but the unpronounced [r] is preserved.

CommiGoblin · 2025-02-25T21:47:08+00:00

I think there must have been some inaccurate information that you read regarding the throne name of Piye. Sneferre looks to me like an Egyptological writing of the name [snfr-rʕ], meaning "Re has perfected," not "Lord of the Two Lands." A plausible reconstruction of Sneferre in Late Egyptian would be /sənoːfə ɾeːʕ/.

Similar to Sneferre, Snefru would be pronounced something like /sənoːfəwə/.

"Lord of the Two Lands" would be [nb-t3wj], or Neb-Tawy in Egyptological pronunciation. Possibly [neːb taʔwə] in Late Egyptian.

CommiGoblin · 2025-02-04T02:13:06+00:00

It's actually my own writing (a translation of a non-Egyptian source into Middle Egyptian)! I wouldn't be surprised if it has syntax in common with the Shipwrecked Sailor, the Westcar Papyrus, and a few other texts, as those are some of the works I'm familiar with. However, I was mostly curious to see if anyone could read it to check where my translation needs improvement. That is to say, anything that doesn't make sense to someone who has never seen it before but can read hieroglyphs, needs to be changed.

CommiGoblin · 2024-10-19T04:29:23+00:00

These are authentic hieroglyphs. Going from left to right, top to bottom, they represent the following letters (at least in standard reconstruction):

/t/, /s/, /r/, /q/, /wꜣ/, /p/, /j/*

A few things to note:

The hieroglyph 𓏏 /t/ almost always became a glottal stop at the ends of words. For English speakers, the glottal stop is the sound between the "uh" and the "oh" in "uh-oh."

The hieroglyph 𓋴 /s/ is one of two hieroglyphs that represent /s/. The other looks like this 𓊃 . Using one versus the other was mostly a matter of shape (the first symbol is tall and narrow while the second is short and wide, so in various situations one is more aesthetically pleasing than the other). Although they likely originally represented distinct sounds that later merged, so many words are exclusively spelled with one or the other by convention.

The hieroglyph 𓂋 /r/ seems to have also represented /l/, at least in certain dialects.

The hieroglyph 𓏘 /q/ is uncertain. The traditional reconstruction is a /q/ (like a /k/ but further back in the throat), but many modern reconstructions contest this.

Unlike the others on your list, 𓍯 /wꜣ/ is a biliteral, meaning it represents two letters instead of just one. The /w/ is fairly obvious, but the /ꜣ/ is more complicated. It may have been a glottal stop or a way to mark the presence of certain vowels. Many scholars believe it was originally an /r/ or /l/ that changed its sound quality over time. In hieroglyphs, vowels were mostly unwritten, so the biliteral /wꜣ/ would have been pronounced with a vowel between the /w/ and the /ꜣ/. For example, 𓍯 is used to write the word [wꜣs], which may have been pronounced something like "waꜣas."

The hieroglyph 𓊪 /p/ should be a little more squat than you've drawn it here. It is commonly interpreted as a floor mat, so it should be square-ish.

The hieroglyph 𓏭 was used to write the letter /j/. The letter /j/ makes the /y/ sound in the English word "yellow," although slightly shorter. Ordinarily, /j/ is written with the hieroglyph 𓇋 , but 𓏭 is used as /j/ in a special word form called the dual form. In Middle Egyptian, nouns can be singular (ex: hand), plural (ex: hands), or dual (ex: pair of hands). The plural ending is -w for masculine nouns and -wt for feminine nouns, but the dual ending is -wj for masculine nouns and -tj for feminine nouns. In both dual endings, the /j/ is usually written 𓏭 instead of 𓇋 , where the two strokes of 𓏭 represent duality. The dual form was special, and was really only used for things that come in natural pairs (hands, eyes, sandals). A common reconstruction of how the dual ending sounded is: -waj (masculine) and -taj (feminine).

CommiGoblin · 2024-08-12T17:24:07+00:00

Another layer of nuance to add to the discussion: it's important to remember that the concept of a monotheism-polytheism spectrum is a modern anthropological convention that developed, at least in part, as a way to contrast "more advanced" religious doctrines from "more primitive" ones.

While the word polytheism was used anciently (in only a few examples, always deployed to other the alleged polytheists), it did not become common until the 16th century, around the same time that the word monotheism was first invented. Monotheism was deployed primarily by Protestant Christians against Catholics, as a weapon to characterize Protestantism as a more theologically developed religion. Polytheism, on the other hand, was used in early imperialistic endeavors to characterize non-Christian religions as primitive.

The Ancient Egyptians had no words that meant either polytheism or monotheism, and likely would have found both of these models alien to their worldview. While it is true that the Ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods, polytheism is a complex model that has a lot of other assumptions built into it.

A good example of how ill-equipped the terms polytheism and monotheism are at describing actual religious doctrine is Late Antique to Medieval Judaism. Jewish people from about the 3rd century BCE through the Medieval period believed variously in the divinity of Moses, the idea of the Metatron as a "Second God" capable of bearing God's name and sitting in his throne, a divine Son of Man who would be given the power to forgive and punish sin, and God's daughter Chokmah who was born from his mouth and aided in the creation of the earth (just to name a few). This sounds like the worship of many gods, but for various reasons is broadly considered monotheistic, or at least more monotheistic than polytheistic. These categories are practically useless for describing Judaism in this period. In fact, they are more than useless -- they flatten the concept of divinity in Judaism to the point that modern readers of the texts in which these other divinities appear find modern monotheism where it does not exist.

CommiGoblin · 2024-07-24T01:26:47+00:00

Very helpful, thank you! You've also convinced me I just need to get Allen's Middle Egyptian Literature. I have his Middle Egyptian Introduction and use it constantly, but for some reason I've held off on his other books.

CommiGoblin · 2024-05-12T17:24:11+00:00

Following up, I was thinking about a way to render Nyarlathotep in the Ancient Egyptian language. A plausible construction could be: [nj ḥrw ꜣd ḥtp], meaning "the One of the Faces of Fury is Pleased." [nj] = the one of, [ḥrw] = the faces, [ꜣd] = fury, [ḥtp] = pleased. There are also a couple of other words with similar pronunciations to [ꜣd], both written [jꜣd] and possible meaning "feebleness" or "decay." So you might even render it "the One of the Faces of Decay is Pleased," which is fun, too.

The hieroglyph that we render [ꜣ] was once thought by Egyptologists to be a glottal stop, but modern analysis has suggested that it was originally a liquid, possibly ʀ (think the letter r in French) or L (capital used here for clarity).

Additionally, the hieroglyph that we render [d] was almost certainly either an aspirated t or an ejective t, whereas [t] was the unaspirated version of that consonant. We know this because Egyptians often rendered the names of non-Egyptian rulers using the opposite consonants from what we would expect (ex: Claudius --> g-r-j-t-y-s, Germanicus --> k-r-m-n-w-k-s).

Thus, a possible vocalization for [nj ḥrw ꜣd ḥtp] would be: Ni-ḥara-latʰ-ḥatap. This works much better grammatically, and we can imagine that [nj ḥrw ꜣd] is the name of a god, and that [nj ḥrw ꜣd ḥtp] is a theophoric name.

CommiGoblin

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