Revisiting Karttunen and Lockhart’s Nahuatl Nasals: Insights from the Phonology and Phonetics of Chicontepec Nahuatl

In a squib on Nahuatl nasals written in 1976, Karttunen and Lockhart address the erratic behavior of nasals in an 18th century Nahuatl text. This paper expands their discussion of Nahuatl nasals with insights from phonological and phonetic analyses of contemporary varieties of Nahuatl. Phenomena such as lenition and phonological neutralization, prosodic glottalization, and the relationship between nasal and laryngeal sounds are explored here as a novel explanation for the patterns they observe for intrusive and omitted nasals in the orthography in the colonial era text. In so doing, the complex arrangement of laryngeal and nasal articulations in Nahuatl phonology and how it relates to written representations is discussed. This paper draws on from fieldwork on Chicontepec Nahuatl, a variety of Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, as well as published descriptions of other varieties of Nahuatl and contributes to the literature on historical varieties of Nahuatl and to our understanding of the relationship between written and spoken Nahuatl.