Café con Nawatl: Jicaras and drunken Bunnies

Today I want to talk about the word “jicara,” one of my favorite words in the Nawatl language. But before we get into that, I would like to briefly touch on some basic Nawatl pronunciation. In particular, the pronunciation of the letter X. This sound tends to get mispronounced a lot, especially by Spanish speakers because there isn’t really a sound in Spanish that approximates the correct sound. In Nawatl, the X is pronounced as an SH sound, like in “shoe.”

The X in Nawatl gives us words like Xochitl, Xoloitzkwintli, and Xochimilko. There is a tendency to mispronounce Xochitl as “So-Cheet” and I’ve also heard “so-chill” (please don’t do that). A good example of the mispronunciation of the X is the word Mexico, which should be pronounced Meshiko. So if you live in the state of New Mexico, take pride in the fact that our state has a Nawatl name, not Spanish. Another way of mispronouncing the X in Nawatl is to make it an H sound, like in the Spanish pronunciation of Mexico.

It is due to the mispronunciation of X that we ended up with the word jicara. The correct way of saying jicara in Nawatl is xikalli (she-kal-lee). If we break this word down, it has two parts. The first part, “xi” means skin, husk, or shell. Basically, the outer covering of…