Question about the length of the vowels in nahuatl.

[Michael Mccafferty]

Mr. Pena-Arellano,

Here's the thing.

Vowel length *is* contrastive in Nahuatl as is it is in other native
American languages.  In Unami, for example, there are even long
*consonants*.

However, since long vowels were not contrastive in the languages of the
Europeans who first recorded all these languages, they rarely received any
special notation.  Miami-Illinois, a Central Algonquian language, has
*highly* contrastive short and long vowels, and yet the early Jesuits who
recorded this language *never* heard it, although one cannot doubt that
comical events occurred in their efforts to use the language.

I learned Classical Nahuatl without paying attention to vowel length,
except for those few well-known words like /toka/ and /to:ka/, things like
that.  It seems that the trend in Nahuatl studies is to take the vowel
lengths in the entire corpus of the language more seriously.


Best regards,

Michael McCafferty



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Michael McCafferty
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mmccaffe at indiana.edu