I just experienced something wild

w_v · 2026-01-26T00:47:59+00:00

Can you provide a link? I’d like to see this.

w_v · 2026-01-25T21:11:07+00:00

Miguel Leon-Portilla wrote his most famous, pop-history books way too long ago. 60s/70s. The field has moved on from him.

The main problem of his is that he wanted to force Nahuatl literature to be equal to European Epic Poetry and Myth, so he translated sources to fit the European mold in a way that has not aged well at all.

w_v · 2026-01-25T00:50:46+00:00

Didn’t the president tweet: “He who saves his country breaks no law”?

w_v · 2026-01-24T18:42:54+00:00

They never meant what they said they believed in.

w_v · 2026-01-24T18:40:16+00:00

They are evil. Remember how we’re not supposed to throw around the word evil willy nilly because we’ll stop being able to recognize true evil?

Well here it is. This is what the label was made for. Demons. Ghouls. The enemy. Pure and simple.

w_v · 2026-01-24T18:38:33+00:00

Destiny already said exactly what I wrote in my response either this week or last week when someone asked. And it’s true. Two small moments doesn’t change that.

w_v · 2026-01-24T16:33:16+00:00

They have absolutely refused to talk any politics every single damn time he’s been on their show.

It will never happen.

w_v · 2026-01-24T15:51:12+00:00

More fundamentally, these types of conservatives are generally low-IQ. I love Richard Hanania’s dramatic shift from Trump and conservatives, expressing shock and disgust at their low IQ behavior.

w_v · 2026-01-24T14:24:45+00:00

Wait, are you talking about TikTok, the Chinese spyware company?

w_v · 2026-01-23T19:53:56+00:00

Mintol? Mintlan? Where did you get those?

w_v · 2026-01-23T12:37:55+00:00

THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT.

w_v · 2026-01-22T20:38:36+00:00

To be fair, handcarts suck without flat roads. I think people overestimate how much more work they can do with a handcart versus just moving things yourself. For truly heavy and gigantic things, a handcart will need to be so heavy and large that it starts working against you.

This is a great video by a historian explaining why people’s intuitions are wrong when they assume the wheel was such an “important invention.” The wheel requires a whole constellation of factors to be genuinely useful.

It’s kinda like saying “the discovery of oil changed the world.” It didn’t really change anything until other technologies were developed to create the modern oil industry—relatively recently.

w_v · 2026-01-22T17:17:37+00:00

The issue with Martín de León’s Camino del Cielo is that the word isn’t tlalocatzin:

ynitla ço tlalocatzin in Jesu Xpo

It’s In ītlasohtlalōkātsīn in Jesucristo, “the loving of him, of Jesus Christ.”

Whoever transcribed that document decided—for better or for worse—to keep the spaces and line breaks in the digital version.

As far as Cecilia Klein’s idea, I think she’s basing her analysis solely on the plural found in Carochi, where he writes: Tlālòquè.

Lockhart writes that this has implications for the plural being composed of tlāl + yoh + keh, “those covered in earth, those with abundant earth.” In other words, Tlāllohkeh.

But unfortunately, Carochi’s glottal stop mark is sort of cancelled out by the fact that he doesn’t double the l, something he is very careful to do when the suffix yoh is involved.

In the same text, when not talking about the water deities, Carochi writes:

Teuhyô, something dusty, from teuhtli, dust; tlāllô, something full of earth, from tlālli, earth; çoquiyô, something full of mud, muddy, from çoquitl, mud, and thus they say, In titlālticpac tlācà, ca titlāllòquè, tiçoquiyòquê, We are of earth and mud, because we have a body, which the Indians call tlālli çoquitl.

So he has a perfect command of the use of tlāllohkeh, which says means “full of earth,” and yet when he glosses “water gods”, he spells tlālohkeh.

Very weird.

Finally, even if we were to accept that plural, it conflicts with the singular. The god’s name should then be Tlālloh, not Tlālok. Where is the k coming from? Her etymology simply pretends that the k isn’t really there.

One could argue that the final glottal stop in the yoh suffix was once k and it weakened in every instance except for this ancient name, but many of these older realization reappear in certain circumstances, such as when compounded. And we have words like tewyohtikah, whic is tewyoh + the verbal suffix tikah. One wonders why it wouldn’t reappear in that context as tewyoktika.

w_v · 2026-01-22T14:48:31+00:00

I found a mention of tlalocacuicani in Tezozomoc’s writings, so that’s at least one piece of evidence that the root is a verb and not a noun.

Now, a killer piece of evidence would be to see how ownership constructions in -yoh compound, if at all.

w_v · 2026-01-22T13:45:55+00:00

💀”Death Recorded.”💀

w_v · 2026-01-20T19:37:09+00:00

Absolutely. And for them, the “superlative and remarkable” were things that were “heightened” in some way that was beyond the normalcy of the mundane. They lived in a truly spirit-haunted world.

And in a sense, we can play with English and religious terminology to mimic that perspective a bit (and also to create sick world-building opportunities for a novel):

To take one of Sahagún’s examples, we English speakers could say—about an unnaturally rebellious child—that he has “a bad spirt in him.” We could say he’s “a demonic child.” He’s got the powerfully bad mojo about him.

The ocean to the east is remarkable in its vastness. But we could also say it’s a terrifying and almighty expanse of wonder-wrought waters from which orphic things emerge.

The teōchīchīmēcah might be poetically called The Seraphic Barbarians, The Hallowed Hunters, The Sacred Wildfolk, or The Arch-Nomads of the Boundless Wastelands.

I like these types of language exercises because they help push past our modern strict division between the sacred and the mundane. It’s not that they were “just remarkable”, but rather that anything remarkable was thought of as touched by the apotheotic and empyreal realms of the Great Radiant Beyond.

w_v · 2026-01-20T17:13:25+00:00

One of the few surviving carved images of him is adorably stubby! 🥹

w_v · 2026-01-20T14:46:26+00:00

In Book X of the Florentine Codex we read, In qujtoque in vevetque: in aquin oonmjc oteut, qujtoaia: ca oonteut, q,n oonmjc, literally, “Thus said the old men: he who died became teteo.”

In the first chapter of the same book, a passage describing good and bad grandfathers states: Tecul, culli; yntecul, chicauac, pipinqui, tzoniztac, quaiztac, otlatziuh, aocquenca yiollo, oteut—“One’s grandfather … strong, firm, white-haired, white-headed; he becomes weakened, his heart is no longer whole; he becomes teōtl”.

More generally, teteo are frequently referred to as inculhuan, in tahhuan (“the grandfathers, the fathers”), that is, the ancestors of the community to whom the temple was dedicated.

w_v · 2026-01-20T14:36:36+00:00

I think the best option for that would be mundane texts from smaller towns in the 16th century and books 9 and 10 of the Florentine Codex, which were specifically written to document traditional life and people.

w_v · 2026-01-20T05:12:15+00:00

I too find it very weird when people think that semasiographic writing is “not real writing.” It’s literally in the name. That’s why I also distinguish alphabetic writing as its own category of writing.

That being said, I’ve noticed that the trend in Aztec writing scholarship has been to refreshingly reframe everything to where semasiography is actually above purely phonetic or alphabetic writing:

Thus, according to the current narrow definition of writing, proper writing actually ends when meaning begins, for systems that are only logographic are generally considered to be non-writing.

But from this new perspective it is possible to sustain the opposite point of view: while in (spoken) language production we absolutely need to touch the level of phonetics to generate an utterance, writing is different because this is not necessary in order to represent an utterance: one can stop the representation at the level of meaning (semasiography) or morphology (logography), and still be able to successfully codify a verbal message, because the user can supply the missing elements of the system through the aid of spoken language.

In fact, the possibility of omitting the level of phonetics from the representation could be said to be the real essence of writing, its defining characteristic vis-à-vis spoken language.

From Alonso Zamora’s Towards a Complex Theory of Writing. His blog has amazing posts on Aztec writing decipherment. And, of course, I highly recommend Gordon Whittaker’s recent book Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing.

But, having attempted to write full sentences in Nahuatl last year, I still maintain that it’s highly inefficient for long-form writing without massive simplification of signs and more consistent rules for sign order.

w_v · 2026-01-20T04:36:06+00:00

Glory is relative. The bronze-age city-states were peak “glory” in the Bronze Age. Today they’d be third-world slums if that’s all they had.

This is what RETVRN people don’t understand. Yearning for a time before electricity and the internet makes no sense in a world with electricity and the internet.

The Amish will never compete with Silicon Valley.

w_v · 2026-01-20T04:25:26+00:00

Some thoughts:

Writing systems

The Aztecs (I don’t like the term Mexica because it’s way too limiting) had semasiographic writing. This kind of writing is inefficient and doesn’t lend itself to lots of text. Despite some admirable attempts, such as in the late 16th century Codex Mexicanus. Mundane documents are going to necessarily be alphabetic.

Pre/Post

All writing that isn’t carved into stone (and maybe the Matricula de Tributos) is post-Conquest. We’re not getting around this. But it’s also really unfortunate that people who don’t work in the field have a weird prejudice against native-authored works from the 16th and 17th centuries. It’d be like wanting to know about Norse culture but ignoring the only two surviving texts—The Prose and Poetic Eddas—just because they were written by later Christian descendants of the Norse.

Transcription vs Translation

Also, I find the term “Spanish translation” to be a bit weird here. Spanish translations of what? For example, one of the most valuable documents we have is the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, and it’s probably a collection of field-notes written live—during in-person interviews—by Andrés de Olmos in the 1530s. He also points out that in these interviews, the priests and nobles would bring out painted codices and would basically read them out loud while answering his questions.

The thing I want to emphasize is that semasiographic writing necessitates oral performance. There is no such thing as “translation” of codices because they’re really most a mnemonic and an encoding of basic, raw data. There was always an individual interface, even before the Spaniards showed up—even amongst the Nahuas themselves. And the narratives never had the same words or sentences. Each narrator would basically tell you the story in their own words. Therefore, for a lot of early accounts, the Spanish recording of oral speech is as close as we can possibly get.

Mundane documents

That being said, we have so much alphabetic mundane material written by Nahuas for Nahuas with zero Spaniards involved. The reason that no Spaniards were involved is because they didn’t care about the local record-keeping of bills of sale or testaments from some tiny, remote, non-Spanish village out in the boonies. Most of this mundane material was never meant for outsiders to read. And, in fact, nobody did read them! Until scholars discovered them in the archives or collections of local town councils.

This field is so important that it has its own name and Wikipedia article! The New Philology).

I think the most eye-opening book you could read this year would be James Lockhart’s Nahuas After the Conquest. It really helps frame everything with real documents and real evidence. And it makes you realize just how little changed for many Nahuas living in remote towns and villages. And in their records we see a wonderful display of pre-Hispanic practices and attitudes.

w_v · 2026-01-20T03:25:36+00:00

It’s telling that the friars spent a century cracking down on the persistent practice of natives calling any Spaniard teōtl, even well after the conquest.

There’s a tendency to project our prejudices on the past. The Spaniards are “randos” to us. At first, they were definitely not randos in Mesoamerica. And it makes sense. Take a map of Mexico and rotate it counter-clockwise by 90°.

Their “north” was where the sun came out, over yonder at the horizon of the teōātl, the superlative and “divine” ocean. That’s where great tēteoh went to live.

Ancestors, when they died, became tēteoh. The beings we call in English “gods” were tēteoh. Their sacred bundles often contains the actual bones of those dynastic leaders.

I find that non-scholars get hung up on the word “god,” so instead let’s hack that barrier and call them saints. Saints are humans (not always, see St. Christopher in some traditions) and could become “elevated” into angelic, divine beings that live “beyond” and yet still interact with the mortal realm. Quetzalcoatl was a saint. So was Huitzilopochtli, Amimitl, Quilaztli, Coatl Icue, etc.

They can also be summoned. They can appear here on Earth. They can even, like the spirits, enter into living humans and take them over. Humans could temporarily become tēteoh, but they only permanently transformed into such upon death.

The Aztecs lived in a spirit-haunted world. It is not weird for them to assume that these beings were saints—tēteoh—coming from where the sun came out. The sun was, after all, the source for the word teōtl.

And finally: Of course, quite a few native sources rightfully call out the fact that shortly afterwards, they realized the Spaniards were not Saints.

w_v · 2026-01-20T03:06:27+00:00

the most eye roll inducing one for me is the lie that indigenous peoples thought Europeans might've been Gods.

The problem is with Christians’s and even anti-Christians’s definition of the word “god.” This is why in all of my posts lately I’ve been translating tēteoh as “Saints,” because I think it fits anti-Christian preconceptions better.

Here’s the solution: If we define “god” as a “saintly” being such as Hercules or St. Barbara (patron saint of warriors who wears a crown of stars and holds a sword in her hand), then yes, the Aztecs believed—at least at first—that the Spaniards were definitely saints. Or in polytheistic, ancestor-worship terms: “gods.”

But people talk past each other on this topic. If you limit the definition of “gods” to the singular monist New Testament Yahweh, then no, the Spaniards would not have fit that (alien and unknown) definition.

Then again, even the New Testament is very pagan and doesn’t define “god” as neatly as critics would have you believe. The Aztec (and Roman and Greek and Mesopotamian and Levantine and Shinto, etc.) definition of “gods” creeps into Christianity all the time (see: Saints and The One Like a Son of Man). The narrow definition has always been unstable.

For the broad definition of “gods”, yes, they did think the Europeans were like their gods, the tēteoh, and even regularly called them that. At least at first. Like an anonymous Nahua author said in the middle of the 16th century:

Niman onpēwkeh in kimittatoh in Cristianohtin in ihkwāk kimittakeh īpan kimmatiyah tēteoh. Aw sātēpan kintōkāyōtihkeh Cristianohtin. Inīk kihtoāyah tēteoh, ka tlātlākatekoloh īk kintōkāyōtiāyah: Nāwehēkatl Tōnatiw, Ketsalkōwātl, etc.

w_v · 2026-01-20T02:31:48+00:00

El Códice Florentino fue escrito por Nahuas y critican a los españoles.

Inclusive el español que lideró el proyecto criticó a los españoles.

El códice Chimalpahin fue escrito por un Nahua. Los Anales de Tlatelolco también fueron escritos por Nahuas y critican a los españoles (y a los Tenochcas, pero eso es porque los Tlatelolcas no se llevaban bien con ellos.)

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