In the Is turkey the bird named after Turkey the country? answer, it mentions the unpronouncable name ‘xuehxolatl’; this becomes a lot more pronouncable when you know that x is pronounced as sh in most mezoamerican languages.
‘shooeysholatel’ still doesn’t roll off the tongue, admittedly.
Welcome to the SDMB and thanks for linking to the report. In previous threads, several posters have pointed out that the word in question is the source of a word in Mexican Spanish meaning “turkey”: guajalote, which would be pronounced something like wa-ha-lo-te.
Were these really in Roman script?
I can’t imagin ethat someone would write a /sh/ or /ch/ or /tch/ as x.
Yep, really in Roman script – as used in Castile.
The Roman alphabet is rather poorly suited to English, and we’ve had to make some adjustments in our orthography to make it fit. Don’t imagine that everyone has made the same compromises, or, indeed, that the same compromises are necessary in every language.
A prof here at the University pronounces the “tl” with a sound not found in English (or any other language I’m familiar with). Place the tongue against the roof of your mouth, sort of like where it is when you pronounce “t”, but flatter and leave it there. Then aspirate, and the air goes over the tongue and comes out on both sides. You usually have to widen the lips in a sort of brief grin to allow the air to escape properly. Whether the sound has a vocal component, like “l”, or not, like “t”, is up to you and is generally determined by what’s easier when you say the whole word.
I don’t know if this is what other people do or if it’s what the Incas et al did, but the prof claims that this is the sound they used.
Actually, that sound is rather commonly pronounced in English. Say the word “rattle,” for instance. Most people will put up the tip of the tongue for the T, and then aspirate the L to the sides.
A bit, yeah. As he pronounced it, there was more air coming through. The tongue was flatter against the top palate, and the sound was more of the whoosh of the air than the remnants of the voiced “l”.
Whether this is how the Incas/Mayans/etc pronounced it, I can’t say. But it sounds so cool! McDonalds added an extra ‘e’ at the end for the gringos, but I like to affect an accent when pronouncing “Chipotl”.
Also: 15th/16th Century Castillian (heck, most Western languages of the time, IIRC) was still not completely squared away as to how it was spelled. Imagine the Conquistador armies’ company clerks and the missionaries attempting to transcribe radically alien sounds from Nahuatl, Maya, or Quichua, using the Roman alphabet with an ear accustomed to Castillian, Latin and Arabic and a Beta-version of rules of spelling.
Transcriptions like “xuehxolatl” are not intuitive to most speakers of modern Spanish either, we have to be taught the particular rules of the age and time.
X is particularly irksome. Depending on time and place, X could be “sh” (as in Uxmal = Ooshmal); it could ALSO be the sound of the modern Castillian-Spanish “J” (sort of a soft germanic " 'ch "), as in the interchangeable use of “México/Méjico” or “Xavier/Javier” [but then, in much of modern American-Spanish, “J” is just an aspirated sound similar to English “h”]. It is modernly used for the KS or GS sound with which English-speakers are familiar, but is ALSO acceptable to pronounce as just plain “s” in words like “extensión” . In Basque-derived words like “Arantxa” it’s a ch- sound; while, since in a lot of our national dialects “ch” and “sh” are indistinguishable, a put-upon scholar could conceivable shoehorn the “hard tch” sound into X to make clear the difference.
Where I live (El Paso) for some reason, the common Mexican-American Spanish word for turkey is “cocono’” (with stress on the final o).
Anyone know the root of that word? In Mexico itself it is “guajolote”, or “pavo”.
No more paella for me!
“Cocono” could be onomatapoeia.
Yo no conozco «cocono».
Nitpick
I don’t know what the correct pronounciation would be in mayan or quechua, but in modern Mexican Spanish, the word is pronounced CHEE - PO - TLE (s) (although its spelt CHILPOTLE). If you ask for chipotl in Mexico City you definatly sound gringo.
Ancient Spanish (ancient Castillian) was very different in its spelling than modern Spanish anywhere. Reading Don Quixote (pronounced KI JO TE) in the original is an exercise in patience to say the least. I think it is like reading Shakespeare for English speakers, you know the essence, but the words are different and have different spellings.
Indeed X in the 16th century stood for a sound similar to SH so Mexico was pronounced more like Meshico. There are traces of this in many words. A town in southern Spain, renowned for its wines, was Xeris which the English transcribed as Sherry and is now Jerez in moder Spanish. The English name is closer to the original today than the Spanish.
I don’t think so. The G would be hard. So it would be gwa-ha-lo-tay. And if you really want to get fancy, pronounce the “ha” with a growl in the back of your throat. Kinda like a q in Arabic.