Friday, May 15, 2015

Men With Guns (1997)




Not to be confused with the silly action crime film of the same name and year as this excellent John Sayles film, shot entirely in Mexico.  It features 7 languages (including a little English), 4 of which are Native.  Kuna (a southern Central American Chibchan language), Maya proper from the Yucatan, and Tzotzil (another Mayan language).  But principle among them is a dialect of modern Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) or modern Aztec.  People not from Mexico or those who are unfamiliar with living Native American languages, tend to think of "Aztecs" as an extinct people--they are not.  In fact many of the modern dialects are Nahuatl are widely spoken and quite healthy as living tongues--many have large numbers of monolinguals, who can't speak a word of Espanol.  Our Nahuatl speaker here comes in the form of the character Domingo, a deeply conflicted soldier, the actor is Damián Delgado.  The language is the clip above is Kuna.











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