Over the centuries, Latin script was utilized to record a large body of Nahuatl prose and poetry, which somewhat mitigated the devastating loss of the thousands of Aztec manuscripts that were burned by Spanish missionaries.
Printed and manuscript texts in Nahuatl generally display a lot of orthographical variety, as there was no official institution that developed and promoted a standard.
[8] The affricates /tʃ/ and /tɬ/ and the approximant /w/ are written with the digraphs ch, tl, and hu: The /w/ does not occur before the vowel /o/, so the spelling huo does not exist.
Thus the name of Cervantes’ famous fictional character was pronounced /dɔn kiʃɔtɛ/ and written as Don Quixote in the 16th century, with the letter x representing /ʃ/.
In his Arte de la Lengua Mexicana (1645), the priest and grammarian Horacio Carochi aimed to provide a full representation of all phonemically relevant features of Nahuatl.
[18] He also marked the presence of word-internal glottal stop with a grave accent on the preceding vowel letter (à, è, ì, ò), and word-final glottal stop with a circumflex on the preceding vowel letter (â, ê, î, ô), for example tlàcuilô /tɬaʔˈkʷiloo̥/ "scribe, painter".
Word-internal glottal stop was occasionally written with the letter h, notably by the 16th-century lexicographer Alonso de Molina, for example tlahca /tɬaʔˈkaˀ/ "by day".
With that, the orthography of post-classical texts shows growing instability, mainly through the influence of dialectal (non-classical) varieties of the language.
Other orthographical variants, encountered in all three stages, are: Since the 1970s, linguists working on Nahuatl have made use of what may be termed a "neoclassical" orthography for the language.
It has to be borne in mind however that the neoclassical spelling is a modern construct, which does not exactly reproduce any of the actual orthographies that were used in historical printed and manuscript sources.
Overview of the neoclassical orthography: Glottal stop occurs frequently in syllable-final position, and very rarely between like vowels in forms that resulted from reduplication.
The frontpage of the first issue of 12 May 1950 carries the headline ININ TOTLAHTOL OKSE: TLEKA TIKIHKWILOSKEH KEMEN KAXTILLAN?