Questionnaires, Elders and Trilingual Students

The method behind the manuscript is unusually explicit for the sixteenth century. Sahagun drew up questions, put them to groups of elders in more than one town, had the answers given in Nahuatl and recorded in Nahuatl by former students of the college at Tlatelolco who wrote Latin, Spanish and their own language, and then revised the material over decades in successive versions. The named collaborators are recorded, which is why the work can be discussed as a collaboration rather than as one friar's book. The final object sets Nahuatl and Spanish in parallel columns with more than a thousand illustrations by Nahua artists.

The Spanish is not a translation. It is frequently shorter, sometimes omits what the Nahuatl says, and occasionally says something different, so a reader working from the Spanish alone is reading an abridgement made for a European audience. That gap is where much modern work happens. Reading the Nahuatl column on its own terms recovers material the Spanish column suppresses, compresses or misunderstands, including formal oratory, the elaborate speech used at births and funerals and installations, and religious concepts for which the friars had no vocabulary they were willing to use. Scholars now generally treat the two columns as two different documents bound together rather than as one text in two languages.