=a]lchiuhcozcameca quenmach totoma in nocuic.

5. I see my song unfolding in a thousand directions, like a string of
precious stones."

From the specimens presented in this volume and from the above
extracts, I would assign the following peculiarities to the poetic
dialect of the Nahuatl:--

I. Extreme frequency and richness of metaphor. Birds, flowers,
precious stones and brilliant objects are constantly introduced in a
figurative sense, often to the point of obscuring the meaning of the
sentence.

II. Words are compounded to a much greater extent than in ordinary
prose writing.

III. Both words and grammatical forms unknown to the tongue of daily
life occur. These may be archaic, or manufactured capriciously by the
poet.

IV. Vowels are inordinately lengthened and syllables reduplicated,
either for the purpose of emphasis or of meter.

V. Meaningless interjections are inserted for metrical effect, while
others are thrown in and repeated in order to express emotion.

VI. The rhetorical figure known as aposiopesis, where a sentence is
left unfinished and in an interjectional condition, in consequence of
some emotion of the mind, is not rare and adds to the obscurity of
the wording.

Sec. 8. _THE PRESERVATION OF THE ANCIENT SONGS._

In a passage already quoted,[42] Sahagun imparts the interesting
information that the more important songs were written down by the
Nahuas in their books, and from these taught to the youth in the
schools. A certain branch of the Mexican hieroglyphic writing was
largely phonetic, constructed on that method to which I have applied
the adjective _ikonomatic_, and by which it was quite possible to
preserve the sound as well as the sense of sentences and verses.[43]
Such attention could have been bestowed only on the sacred, royal, or
legendary chants, while the compositions of ordinary poets would only
be disseminated by oral teaching.

By one or both of these methods there was a large body of poetic
chants the property of the Nahuatl-speaking tribes, when they were
subjugated by the Europeans. Among the intelligent missionaries who
devoted their lives to mastering the language and translating into it
the doctrines of Christianity, there were a few who felt sufficient
interest in these chants to write some of them down in the original
tongue. Conspicuous among these was the laborious Bernardino de
Sahagun, whose works are our most valued sources of information on
all that conce