The Uehuetlahtolli by Friar Andrés de Olmos: linguae Mexicanae exercitatio

Abstract

The “Art of the Mexican language” by Friar Andrés de Olmos, the first grammar of the Nahuatl language, written around 1545, contains in book III two chapters intended to exemplify the grammatical postulates contained in the Art, as the author himself points out. Of them, “The Manners of speaking in the speech of the ancients”, which was one of the first literary testimonies of Nahuatl, has often been decontextualized from grammar, to give way to various assumptions about its composition and function. This article explains the vicissitudes of these Uehuetlahtolli, from a philological and codicological perspective, and explains the reasons why almost 450 years after Friar Andrés de Olmos wrote the talks, these have been distorted to the point of forgetting their fundamental function: a practical exercise on the Mexican language.