• Katrisia@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    Aztlán was the place they said they came from (probably in today’s U.S. territory). The “Aztecs” called themselves “Mexica”. That’s also their name in Spanish, and I have a faded memory that it is not the name in English only because an anthropologist had trouble pronouncing it or something. Whatever.

    Mexicas (meh - SHE - kahs) founded Tenochtitlan. After its fall, you are right, Mexico was named ‘Mexico’ from Nahuatl but people pronounced and pronounce it ‘MEH - hee - koh’ because of the Spanish language influence (think, as in Quixote, ‘kee - HO - teh’).

    There were Mexican intellectuals pushing for a ‘meh - SHEE - koh’ pronunciation in the 20th century, but they failed miserably.