The written language of Aztecs

The written language of Aztecs is one of the Americans written languages that existed on the continent before Columbus discovered it. It was used during the empire of Incas that was situated on the territory of the modern Mexico. The written language of Aztecs was not less developed than the language of Mayas and was the number of logograms with the limited number of phonetic elements.

The written language of Aztecs was borrowed probably from other peoples of the Central America and especially from Mishtecs that were conquered by Aztecs. The data on the origins of the language is not rather rich because Aztecs burned all manuscripts of the conquered peoples. Later the Spanish conquerors damaged a lot of texts of Aztecs. That led to the fact that nowadays the written language of Aztecs is known by the bilinguals that use Spanish and Aztec language and are kept only in monuments and dishes.

In compare with hieroglyphic of Maya the Aztecs written language was developed worse and was drawing the image of events with the elements of phonetic inscriptions used in proper names. The written language of Aztecs was not adapted to fix the human speeches and long texts and in such sense it is not the full-blown written language.

The reading of inscriptions was very difficult and had several variants of reading. Some signs could have several meanings. The use of written language was limited by fixing the historical events.