aquen. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

aquen.

Principal English Translation:

it doesn't matter; I don't care how; I don't know anything about it; etc. (see Carochi and Olmos; in no way; in no manner)

Orthographic Variants:

aquen, àmō quēn, amo quen

Horacio Carochi / English:

àquēn = used in expressions of not mattering or not caring (combining the negative "à" with "quēn," how)

Horacio Carochi, S.J., Grammar of the Mexican language with an explanation of its adverbs (1645), translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart, UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 420–21 (with n7), 497.

Andrés de Olmos:

Aquen ninochiua, ninguna enfermededad ni mal siento; --aquen nicah, bueno estoi; --aquen nopan, no se nada, scil. de lo que dezis, o no es mi culpa.
Andrés de Olmos, Arte para aprender la lengua Mexicana, ed. Rémi Siméon, facsimile edition ed. Miguel León-Portilla (Guadalajara: Edmundo Aviña Levy, 1972), 180.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written:

ahquēn = particle. negative expression used in certain idiomatic phrases. ahquēn cah, or ahquēn mochīhua, for nothing to be wrong with something, for someone to be serene and normal. ahquen nicmati, not to care (a whit) about something. ah negative, quēn
James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 211.

Attestations from sources in English:

aquen (adverb) = nothing, in no manner
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry: Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems (1887), 150.

auh maçonelihui in yehuantin Iudiome, cenca yc oquimotlahuelnamiquilique, ca niman ahquen omuchiuh in iyollotzin = And although the Jews greatly opposed him (St. John), he was not at all perturbed
Fray Juan Bautista, Sermonario, 1606, f. 583v.; translation by Mark Z. Christensen, "Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Ecclesiastical Texts and Local Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan," Ph.D. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2010, Appendix D, 11.

Àquēn câ in noyōllo (Aquen ca in noyollo) = My heart is calm, I feel no passion against anyone.
Horacio Carochi, S.J., Grammar of the Mexican language with an explanation of its adverbs (1645), translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart, UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 421.

Often combined with first-person statements, such as I am not sick, it is not my fault, I don't know anything. For example, Áquen nicmati. = I don't feel this at all (i.e., it makes no difference to me).
Michel Launey, An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, translated and adapted by Christopher MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 132.