TY - JOUR

T1 - Poetic Pairings and Lexical Calques at Teotihuacan

T2 - Forays in Historical Linguistics

AU - Helmke, Christophe

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Although the writing system of Teotihuacan (100 ೬೭–೫೮ 600) continues to resistphonetic decipherment, many important forays have been made in recent decades. Withphonetic values still wanting, these texts cannot be verbalized and yet, semantic values can beproposed for discrete combinations of signs. Progress has been made using this exploratorymethod, yielding semantically coherent sequences, known from important linguistic groups ofcentral Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. These sequences constitute metaphoricalexpressions, and as pairings are characteristic of Mesoamerican lyricism, which are all the moreremarkable given the intervening millennium. These poetic expressions pair terms togetheras metaphorical units, which are often translated across languages in a process known aslinguistic calquing. Most linguistic investigations of calques focus on modern attestationsin Mesoamerican languages, at times retracing these features to the ethnohistoric literatureproduced in the wake of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The present study delvesmuch further back, by focusing on the poetic pairings attested in the graphic corpus ofTeotihuacan a millennium before. These poetic expressions therefore provide an apt avenue forinvestigating the language and writing of the great city and reveal that such poetic pairings fi ndtheir origin in the language of this metropolis. As a contribution to contact and areal linguistics,this paper presents a study of lexical calques attested at Teotihuacan, examining their spatial andtemporal distribution, prompting a discussion of language affi liation to evaluate whether thesecan reveal evidence for linguistic adscription.

AB - Although the writing system of Teotihuacan (100 ೬೭–೫೮ 600) continues to resistphonetic decipherment, many important forays have been made in recent decades. Withphonetic values still wanting, these texts cannot be verbalized and yet, semantic values can beproposed for discrete combinations of signs. Progress has been made using this exploratorymethod, yielding semantically coherent sequences, known from important linguistic groups ofcentral Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. These sequences constitute metaphoricalexpressions, and as pairings are characteristic of Mesoamerican lyricism, which are all the moreremarkable given the intervening millennium. These poetic expressions pair terms togetheras metaphorical units, which are often translated across languages in a process known aslinguistic calquing. Most linguistic investigations of calques focus on modern attestationsin Mesoamerican languages, at times retracing these features to the ethnohistoric literatureproduced in the wake of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The present study delvesmuch further back, by focusing on the poetic pairings attested in the graphic corpus ofTeotihuacan a millennium before. These poetic expressions therefore provide an apt avenue forinvestigating the language and writing of the great city and reveal that such poetic pairings fi ndtheir origin in the language of this metropolis. As a contribution to contact and areal linguistics,this paper presents a study of lexical calques attested at Teotihuacan, examining their spatial andtemporal distribution, prompting a discussion of language affi liation to evaluate whether thesecan reveal evidence for linguistic adscription.

UR - https://www.boundaryend.com/ancient-america

M3 - Journal article

VL - 15

SP - 1

EP - 61

JO - Ancient America

JF - Ancient America

SN - 1531-2097

ER -