These quantities are prominent features in the formal portions of the language, characterizing inflections and declinations. No common means of designating them have been adopted by the grammarians, and for my present purpose, I shall make use of the following signs:—
| ă | , | short. |
| a | , | intermediate |
| ā | , | long. |
| â | , | with stress. |
The general prosodic rules are:—
1. In polysyllabic words in which there are no long vowels, all the vowels are intermediate.
2. The vowels are long in the penultimate of the plurals of the imperatives when the preterit of the verb ends in a vowel; the ā of the cān of the imperatives; the ī of the tī; of the gerundives; the last vowel of the futures when the verb loses a vowel to form them; the penultimates of passives in lo, of impersonals, of verbals in oni, illi, olli and oca, of verbal nouns with the terminations yan and can; the ō of abstract nouns in otl in composition; and those derived from long syllables.
3. Vowels are "with stress" when they are the finals in the plurals of nouns and verbs, also in the perfect preterite, in possessives ending in â, ê, ô, and in the penultimate of nouns ending in tli, tla and tle when these syllables are immediately preceded by the vowel.[22]
The practical importance of these distinctions may be illustrated by the following examples:—
| tâtli | , | father. |
| tātlĭ | , | thou drinkest. |
| tātlî | , | we drink. |
It is, however, evident from this example that the quantity of Nahuatl syllables enters too much into the strictly formal part of the language for rules of position, such as some of those above given, to be binding; and doubtless for this reason the eminent grammarian Carlos de Tapia Zenteno, who was professor of the tongue in the University of Mexico, denies that it can be reduced to definite rules of prosody like those of the Latin. [23]
Substituting accent for quantity, there would seem to be an iambic character to the songs. Thus the first words of Song I, were probably chanted:—