Professor Francis M. Tyers from Indiana University will speak on the Florentine Codex.
The Florentine Codex is a bilingual text produced in Mexico in the 16th century. It describes the lives and beliefs of the Indigenous people who were living in the Valley of Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish. The text is in Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the area, and is accompanied by a translation or summary in Spanish. In this talk we describe the processing of the Nahuatl text and some linguistic issues that will need to be addressed in the annotation, including relational nouns, functional incorporation and subordination and clause structure. We also describe efforts to translate from the Nahuatl of the era to modern varieties of Nahuatl spoken in the Sierra of Puebla.
