Better nahua then never

Around the time that all those indígenas in Guatemala that had been watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on bootleg DVDs were getting into a spear-chucking frame of mind over its portrayal of their ancestors, it occurred to me that the main reason Gibson chose to deploy Yucatec-Maya speakers in a story that would after all have been better suited to the mightily unsqueamish Mexica (Aztecs), was the comparative shortage of compadres fluent in Nahuatl.

This is now being addressed by municipal authorities in Mexico City: teaching Nahuatl will become a compulsory part of the curriculum in the capital's schools by the start of the 2008 academic year.

Until someone makes that epic about the fall of Tenochtitlán, students of the city's native tongue can amuse themselves with the not inconsiderable body of significant Aztec poetry. (The other reason I think Gibson avoided Moctezuma and his co-linguists was the likely expense of convincingly reconstructing their urban environment. The Maya could be more easily capped at a few steep-stepped pyramids poking up through the forest canopy.)