I'll try to be clear on this. My issue is that I constantly see fallacious information concerning El Salvador's indigenous past. I would like to address two: 1. Civilization in El Salvador... ...by the Native American Pipil people, who were descendants of the Aztecs. Rebuttal 1: First and foremost the Pipil are not descendants from the Aztecs, the term Aztecs is usually reserved for the Mexica people of Tenochtitlan. In fact, based on oral history (mainly of the Nicarao, who arguably spoke a very similar language to Nahua-Pipil), and anyone can look this up by reading William Fowler, Lyle Campbell and Paul Amaroli (I'll list the references below),it clearly suggests that the people migrated south from central Mexico and arrived in Central America by 900 AD, well before any existence of the Mexica hegemony or as they are known, the Aztecs. So that has to be changed, the Nahua-Pipil are a distinct people and not Azteca. 2. They called their territory Kozkatlan, a Nahuatl word... Rebuttal 2: No this is fallacious. First Nahua-Pipil is not Nahuatl (or Classical Aztecan) it is different, and perhaps an older form of Nahuat (see: Lyle Campbell), and referred to as Nahua-Pipil. Second Kozkatlan, is normally spelled Cozcatlan and not with a 'k' (that is ever with a), so this is an orthographic problem (from cozcatl [jewel; necklace] and the locative suffix -tlan [land of]) (you can see any Nahuatl dictionary to verify this). Okay now that that is out of the way, the Pipil called their land Cuzcatan, please notice the "t" instead of the "tl" sound, in fact look up Nahuat in wikipedia for further information to verify this. So quite literally the name means "place of jewels", I admit the exact meaning is lost, but may have referred to the rich soil in the department of San Salvador. So saying that its Aztecan or Nahuatl is misleading. In fact the right toponym was abandoned more than 150 years ago, in favor of Cuzcatlán and Cuscatlán, in preference to the Classic Nahuatl spoken by the Mexica.
This corrections have to be made, they are not my opinion, they are factual. It also delegitimatizes the legacy of the Nahua-Pipil and in my opinion, extends the final blow of Alvarado, the eradication of the original inhabitants of western El Salvador of the 1500's.
References:
Amaroli, Paul E. 1986 En La Busqueda de Cuscatlan: Un Proyecto Etnohistórico y Arqueológico. Unpublished manuscript, Patronato Pro-Patrimonio Cultural, San Salvador. (you can get this in the FUNDAR website)
Campbell, Lyle 1985 The Pipil Language of El Salvador. Berlin: Mouton.
Fowler, William R., Jr. 1989 The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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