Reconstrucción del sistema de sibilantes del español a través de la transliteración de nahuatlismos

Abstract

There are many studies about the pronunciation of Spanish language when it arrived to Mexico; but it hasn’t given enough importance to the transcription of Amerind voices as a means to know the Spanish phonology of the XVI Century. We claim that any speaker; when he is before a foreign language; he adapts the unknown sounds to his own phonetics; then we can obtain data about the phonological system that was brought to the New Spain if we base our study on the analysis of the transliteration of the nahuatlisms. The corpus for this research consist in 94 documents form the XVI Century; some of them are personal letters and others are texts written by conquers like Hernán Cortés or Diego de Ordaz. We have also included some historic documents written by Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego de Durán. We follow the phonological system that has been established by several authors for the XVI Century (Lapesa; 1985; Alarcos; 1988; Alonso; 1972; Perissinotto; 1994; Arias; 1995); as will as data that have been established for the Classic nahuatl (Swadesh; 1966 and Andrews; 1976). Afterwards we have analyzed the transliteration of the nahuatl voices that have been registered; we establish the Spanish system for the mentioned century and we contrast it with the parameters mentioned above. On the other hand; we also compare the transliteration of the indigenisms that we have registered with the transliteration that was made by the grammarian-missionaries (Olmos; 1547; Molina; 1571-75; Carochi; 1615).