From campbel at indiana.edu Fri Jun 2 03:32:05 2006 From: campbel at indiana.edu (R. Joe Campbell) Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:32:05 -0400 Subject: Schools In-Reply-To: <0IZM00HK7K5C8Y@smtp.prodigy.net.mx> Message-ID: David, When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm curious about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live on my hallway and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other branches on the tree. Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation was... again, beyond belief. Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a language expert and work in the course with me. We worked together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various Nahuatl dialects. And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. Iztayohmeh, Joe p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning Nahuatl. Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > Estimados listeros: > > I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was > transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Fri Jun 2 11:53:11 2006 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 07:53:11 -0400 Subject: Fwd: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools Message-ID: ----- Forwarded message from mmccaffe at indiana.edu ----- Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 07:51:33 -0400 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu Reply-To: mmccaffe at indiana.edu Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools To: "R. Joe Campbell" In grad school I wanted to take a language of the Americas. There was only Zapotec and Nahuatl offered that semester. Before the semester started I called the Zapotec teacher and he wasn't home. I called the Nahuatl teacher, Joe Campbell, and he was home, and he was enthusiastic about teaching the course. So, I signed up. Then i spent two semesters daily with Joe in a Nahuatl class with one other student. It was the best class i ever took, hands down. By the second semester we were reading the Florentine codex. After that i studied Andrews and Thelma Sullivan, Carochi, on my own, and a few others. Then a few years later, I taught Nahuatl to three successive beginning groups and two advanced groups at Indiana. When the money dried up, I joined a "Nahuatl circle" that includes Joe and Pablo Garcia, my best student. That's my story. Michael McCafferty Quoting "R. Joe Campbell" : > David, > > When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the > question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm > curious about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live > on my hallway > and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and > talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation > than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. > > The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and > perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. > No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with > us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one > that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. > > It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what > they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, > who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other > branches on the tree. > > Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, > Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few > days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University > of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then > entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, > preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. > Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the > summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary > was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation > was... again, beyond belief. > > Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb > formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of > my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to > teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, > in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a > language expert and work in the course with me. We worked > together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my > learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more > years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. > > In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, > Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in > learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked > on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, > then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine > Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. > > For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various > Nahuatl dialects. > > And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor > in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl > now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. > > Iztayohmeh, > > Joe > > p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros > if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning > Nahuatl. > > Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? > > > > On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > >> Estimados listeros: >> >> I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was >> transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From b.leeming at rivers.org Fri Jun 2 12:29:27 2006 From: b.leeming at rivers.org (b.leeming at rivers.org) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:29:27 -0400 Subject: Schools Message-ID: Listeros- I, too, have been following this thread closely and have enjoyed reading individual's tales of learning Nahuatl. My introduction to Nahuatl came through research I did last year under the supervision of Davíd Carrasco at Harvard. (I wrote my graduate thesis on the so-called Testerian catechisms used in the evangelization of the indigenous population of Mexico.) Since then I have been working (slowly!) through Lockhart's "Nahuatl As Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl." However, without the aid of a master teacher or even a group of like-minded students, the going has been very slow. So, my question is: Short of attending a summer program in Mexico (travel is difficult right now due to young children), does anyone know of a Nahuatl scholar in the Boston, MA area or can anyone connect me with others in this part of the country who have an interest in learning Nahuatl? Thank you! Ben Leeming The Rivers School Weston, MA _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at nantucket.net Fri Jun 2 10:42:02 2006 From: karttu at nantucket.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 06:42:02 -0400 Subject: How I got to Nahuatl Message-ID: When I was a brand-new Indiana University grad student in linguistics, Joe Campbell was a brand-new assistant professor. I took a course in the history of linguistics from Joe, but we didn't do any Nahuatl then. Since those days, we have become firm friends and colleagues and had our share of adventures in Mexico. In 1967-68, while I was an NSF pre-doc fellow in computational linguistics at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, I met Jim Lockhart, who also lived in Santa Monica. From there I moved on to the University of Texas, Austin, where I held a series of research positions in linguistics. Shortly after that Jim relocated from UCLA to UT-Austin for a brief time before returning to UCLA. While in Austin he approached me with a problem: The archives of Mexico are stuffed with indigenous-language documents, probably vital to any colonial Latin-American historian like Jim, but there were no organized courses teaching these languages. The language of the largest number of these colonial documents is Nahuatl. Jim asked me as a linguist about how one approaches such a language. As it turned out, it was Jim who did the intensive leading over the next several years. I went to Finland on a Fulbright research fellowship and then on to MIT for a year. In the meantime Jim went back to UCLA. From there on, we carried on most of our collaboration by xerox machine and the USPS. Jim flooded me with transcriptions and provisional translations and sent me photo-copies of many significant works such as the facsimile of Carochi 1645. I would never have gotten anywhere without his immense generosity. After I got back to UT-Austin, I made a trip to Mexico City while Jim was there on sabbatical carrying on archival research. He introduced me to the Mexico City nahuatlahtos such as Miguel León Portilla and his wife Chonita, Fernando Horcasitas, Thelma Sullivan, Nigel Davies, and others. I also met Fritz Schwaller on my first visit to Mexico. Later I met Fred Nagel and even more nahuatlahtos in Mexico. In the States Jim provided me with a letter of introduction to Arthur Anderson, which was a huge privilege. Together Jim and I combed Mexico City book stores for more books. And one day, when I was visiting the National Archives and had some waiting to do while Jim worked on something or other, he ordered up a Nahuatl manscript to occupy me. It turned out that without ever having taken a paleography course, I had a knack for transcribing colonial Nahuatl. I even cracked a hard nut that Thelma had been chewing on for a long time. During that brief time Jim and I produced Nahuatl in the Middle Years, connecting the Classical Nahuatl of Olmos, Molina, Carochi, et al., with the modern studies of spoken Nahuatl via material drawn from the colonial documents. Also, Joe Campbell had by this time moved to UT-San Antonio, and Elizabeth Hill (later Boone) and I were burning up IH-35 visiting Joe at least once a week to work with him and his computerized Nahuatl teaching material. Like Jim Lockhart, Joe was unstinting in his generosity with Nahuatl material. I carted home wheelbarrows full of computer print-out from his fieldwork. Later Joe let me build on the basis of his computerized Nahuatl lessons to produce the notebook Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar, copies of which Fritz Schwaller has so faithfully distributed over these many years. In the mid 1970s I went to Tepoztlan to live with a local family and maintained my connections in Tepoztlan for many years. I also had the privilege of going out on interviewing trips with Joe, and once I made a trip up to the Huasteca with Karen Dakin, who has been a good friend and fellow linguist. Jim and I once made a trip deep into the hinterland of Guererro to visit Una Canger, who was living and working there. It became clear from the grammar of J. Richard Andrews plus our by-now-well-worn copies of Carochi that a modern dictionary of Nahuatl showing distinctive vowel length and segmental glottal stop was greatly needed, and that my abilities in computational data processing and linguistic analysis would make me the logical person to do it. I got a series of NSF grants to do An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl and an NEH grant to do a book about the Bancroft huehuehtlahtolli co-authored with Jim Lockhart. I went back to Finland during this time, so much of the Nahuatl dictionary was compiled in a lake-side cottage in the Finnish countryside. Joe left UTSA, but by this time my own Nahuatl work--some co-authored with Jim, some co-authored with Joe, and the rest done on my own--continued unchecked. Part of the impetus for the work came from the unfailing support of Fermando Horasitas (whose death left us bereft), Thelma Sullivan, Yolanda Lastra, and Miguel Leon-Portilla and Ascension H. de L-P (Chonita). One of the fascinating people in Nahuatl studies is doña Luz Jiménez, who worked with Fernando Horcasitas. I did not have the good fortune to meet doña Luz in life, but through her Nahuatl compositions, I felt as though she was an intellectual mother. Joe and I interviewed members of her family, and I wrote her career biography as part of my book Between Worlds. Since then we have enjoyed an especially warm and close relationship with Jesús Villanueva, the grandson of doña Luz, who has recently produced a CD about her life and work. At UT-Austin I directed two NEH Summer Institutes at while Joe and I and Alberto Zepeda taught Nahuatl. Alberto was a brilliant teacher and a dear friend, and we were devastated when he died of leukemia. Among the many wonderful participants in those NEH institutes was John Charlot, whose father--the painter Jean Charlot--had been particularly close to doña Luz in the 1920s and maintained a close connection through letters after he moved to New York and eventually to Hawaii. Because of the letters from Luz to Charlot that are archived at the U. of Hawaii-Manoa, I spent an academic year in Hawaii, and my connections through that year and with the Charlot family have been very fruitful. When my husband retired from UT-Austin, I took early retirement, and we left Texas. Shortly thereafter, completely out of the blue, I was contacted by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, who was seeking help with creating a libretto for an opera about the Conquest of Mexico that had been commissioned for the Prague National Opera. His concept was for the Spaniards to sing in 16th-century Spanish, the Aztecs to sing in Classical Nahuatl, and the character of doña Marina, the Nahua interpreter for Cortés, to interpret to the opera's audience what was going on. After I worked for Lorenzo as a consultant for a while, he generously suggested we share credit as co-librettists. The opera had its premiere in Prague in March 2005, and we hope it will find many other venues in the near future. Most recently I recorded a podcast about doña Marina ("la Malinche") for NuestraFamiliaUnida. Frances Karttunen _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at morris.umn.edu Fri Jun 2 13:38:41 2006 From: schwallr at morris.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:38:41 -0500 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: Colleagues, At the risk of being repetitious, my story is not really that exciting. Like Fran Karttunen and Michael McCafferty, I was a graduate student at Indiana University. Unlike them, I was studying colonial Mexican history. My advisor, John Lombardi, suggested that learning Nahuatl might be of great utility in my research. It just so happened that IU was a federally funded Latin American Studies center and offered Nahuatl, and other native languages, which qualified for federal assistance under the National Defense Foreign Language Act. So my second year of graduate work I earned a fellowship to learn Nahuatl under the direction of Joe Campbell. It was one of those transformative experiences. Joe was/is so passionate about the language that it was impossible not to get sucked in. My fondest memories are of making glossaries of Nahuatl words that we would then enter on to punch cards to form Joe's data base. We read the Horcasitas folk tales, and then worked on individual entries in the Molina dictionary. After about 2 years with Joe, I even had the temerity to offer Nahuatl at IU through the popular university program. I used to joke that I learned Nahuatl from a computer, programmed by Joe. I also recall that when I tried to read Sahagun it seemed the most difficult and impenetrable thing I had ever seen. As a graduate student I began to catalogue Nahuatl language manuscripts in the US, working first with the collection at the Lilly Library. In 1974, I met Jim Lockhart, and got to know Fran Karttunen, as I provided minimal archival assistance in finding colonial Nahuatl documents. I then went on to a career as a history and Spanish prof. At every institution where I have worked, I have taught Nahuatl, Florida Atlantic University, the U. of Montana, and here at the U. of Minnesota. Once I became an administrator and archival research became more difficult because of my "day job," I have turned more and more to Nahuatl. It's something I can work on in my spare moments. Also in the mid-1980s I received funding from NEH to develop a catalogue of Nahuatl language manuscripts in the US, which was eventually published by the Academy of American Franciscan History. Also in the mid-80's at the behest of Marc Eisinger of France, I initiated this discussion list. It makes it one of the oldest lists around, having begun during the precursor to the internet, bitnet. I also developed www.nahuatl.org, which unfortunately languishes from time to time due to my commitments elsewhere. As Fran pointed out, I make copies of the "Foundation Course" available. Right now it is out of print, but when I get to Potsdam, NY, I'll have more copies printed and it will be for sale once again. I have worked on the Guide to Confession written by Bartolome de Alva, on some of the cofradia constitutions of Molina, and recently I have been looking at nuances in Sahagun's Psalmodia and Coloquios. Ironically I now find Sahagun to be quite clear and straightforward and use selections for readings when I teach Nahuatl. I must give my deepest thanks to Joe Campbell and certainly to Fran Karttunen. Without them I would never have persisted in Nahuatl as long as I have. Their passion for the language has certainly inspired me. John F. Schwaller President SUNY Potsdam schwaljf at potsdam.edu Until 6-30-06: University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at morris.umn.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com Fri Jun 2 15:08:20 2006 From: MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com (Maria) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:08:20 -0700 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: I forgot to mention. At UCSD, where I got my PhD, I only knew John Sullivan who was interested in Náhuatl. I believe he had a very hard time convincing his professors there could be a specialty in Náhuatl or at least a graduate student working in a doctoral dissertation in Náhuatl. Beyond that there was not an interest in American Languages at all. I am speaking for the field of Cultural Studies and Literature. In linguistics the interest died. In my times Linguistics was into the Natural Approach, with massive offerings in Spanish and less in French, German, Italian and Russian. Again, little Mandarin and Japanese. Those who specialized in Mexico did it on interesting fields, like Jewish Mexican Literature and other aspects of culture having little to do with Old Mexico. As a Mexicanist, I felt sad the majority of advisors suggested and even induced students to focus on Modern Mexico and literatures gravitating around Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and José Emilio Pacheco (if lucky). So Náhuatl, totally out of the question. Maria Bolivar "We don´t see things as they are, We see things as we are." Anais Nin Dr. María Dolores Bolívar MBOLIVAR at san.rr.com http://geografiaserrantes.com/laruda/ http://geografiaserrantes.com/imaginomios/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com Fri Jun 2 15:06:30 2006 From: MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com (Maria) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:06:30 -0700 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: Joe, we should seriously work in compiling in some form all these testimonies. I am always interested about people who decide to learn other languages, whatever language they may choose. The more I teach or work with languages I realize those of us who learn languages belong in an endangered group. In the community college, today, even Spanish classes that used to be packed are losing numbers. German is no longer taught. There are only two or three courses available in Arabic. Japanese and Mandarin have one or two sections, not more than that. My students they fall in two general categories. Those who see the importance of learning languages but are caught up in the business of having someone teach them and not learning it themselves. The other group is made of those who realize -of course I want to be counted among this bunch- learning a language involves a life endeavor, a daily effort made of heroic acts of loyalty to the task. I have wanted to enroll in an Arabic class, for instance, since about a month ago, and the possibilities are so few my project doesn't even seem realistic, to anybody. The ones I have found are advanced, which tells me they are geared for the children of Arabic speakers who want to recuperate what they have lost. Believe it or not, the only online possibility I found came from Montana State University. I frankly was appalled to learn the interest for Arabic in Montana exceeded San Diego's. As for Náhuatl... Two years ago I found in San Marcos, desperate to do something more than work the fields for a minimum wage, a teacher/poet of Náhuatl. I sent a wide invitation to form a group and come up with a decent pay for him. IT would have amounted to a hundred to two hundred dollars per person, per semester, even less, depending on how many joined. I really thought at least ten people would show up, eager to learn. I was too optimistic. Not one person showed up. Many responded, I must say. There were plenty of good deeds and good excuses. Lack of time was number one. A lot said they were not sure that they could give themselves two hours a week for as long as they needed to learn "such a difficult" language. I asked the teacher to stay put and be patient. I thought I needed to be more persuasive. I offered to pitch in with a demo lesson so everyone would be happy and motivated. I did schedule it, not a soul showed up. They wrote to me that second time, and promised, provided I organized it on a weekend, to come next time. End result, the teacher got discouraged and never called again. I have known two teachers who knew Náhuatl and could share their knowledge practically. I tried signing up to go to Morelos, to spend the summer. But I was told my children could not come -at the time 5 and 7. The trip meant camping out and sleeping in places they did not think appropriate for children. I know we would have loved it but they did not think so. Maybe they thought we would be too picky. So all the Náhuatl I have learned I have learned it pretty much on my own. Almost like I learned Latin, to keep it in my box of treasures and share it once every life. I work both for the Community College and for San Diego State University. I have tried convincing them to teach Náhuatl and/or Purépecha and find out if there is an interest. They decline graciously my invitation. I have interviewed hundreds of workers from Latin American Countries. I know there are a lot of Mayan speakers, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Purépecha. It would be great if there could be a conscious drive to show how these languages count and that it is important to spread and document their existence. But often I find myself alone in thinking this way. It would be nice to find a group in the San Diego area of people who want to become active speakers. If you have the said references send them to me. I offer my place to start that circle. I will provide the coffee, the music, the candles, the materials, the housekeeping, everything to do that. I have all the books and materials you can possibly think, and I will start a group with as many as another person for as long as it takes us both to recruit any one else. Maria Bolivar "We don´t see things as they are, We see things as we are." Anais Nin Dr. María Dolores Bolívar MBOLIVAR at san.rr.com http://geografiaserrantes.com/laruda/ http://geografiaserrantes.com/imaginomios/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 2 19:20:31 2006 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 15:20:31 -0400 Subject: Schools Message-ID: I've always been curious about how and where Andrews learned Nahuatl. It was my understanding that he taught in the Spanish and Portuguese dept. at Vanderbilt with a primary specialization in Medieval and/or Golden Age literature. In the introduction to his book he says that he first taught it in 1967 or somewhere close to that. Does anybody know where he studied Nahuatl? Did he learn it on his own? And what about Anderson and Dibble? Did they study in Mexico City? I guess metaphorically speaking, I'm sort of on the same floor as Joe, but he made me feel guilty for not responding. So although what I have to say may be a little redundant and in some cases maybe obvious, here is my two cents. I don't know that much about the teaching of Nahuatl in Mexico City, but outside of Mexico City and in the US over the last few decades, I think there have been/are at least four major sources/centers of Nahuatl teaching/learning for non-native speakers. 1. As everyone probably knows, Lockhart has probably produced the greatest number of scholars who go on to produce translations and use Nahuatl in historical research. If you come across someone who works with Nahuatl and got their Ph.D. from UCLA or in some cases even from universities near by there as in John's case, then it is likely that they studied with him. My impression is that Lockhart's students are primarily interested in the language as a tool of historical research, but there are a few exceptions (see #4). I think Lockhart's group has produced several people who have been producing translations, because this kind of thing was integrated into their graduate training and often as part of their dissertation research program. 2. As Joe already mentioned, he has been teaching Nahuatl at Indiana for many years and he is a very generous contributor to Nahuat-l. Michael and Fritz have already mentioned that they studied with Joe. There are also several other people who studied with Joe, like me, who participate to one degree or another on this list but haven't necessarily made new scholarly contributions to knowledge of the language or been influential in producing new generations of Nahuatl scholars (at least not yet). In the case of Nahuatl studies at Indiana, I think there have been different times at which there was a convergence of the stars or alignment of the planets or something during which there have been higher levels of activity and interest. As Michael has explained, there has been one such period of interest and activity recently with Pablo. While I was there from the mid to late 1990s was another such period originally made possible in part by a government grant in the Center for Latin American Studies, but also strengthened and extended as a result of a group of really interested and motivated students (Jongsoo Lee, Mark Morris, and me). I say "really interested" because, you have to be really interested in order to survive the rigor of Joe's classes (I don't think he will mind me saying this). His formal courses are very intense and demanding, but the experience is also very rewarding. And even after completing all the formal coursework that the funding allows, he generously volunteers to continue working in a regular study session mode with students who are interested. At one point, we were also fortunate to be able to bring in a Mexican scholar and native Nahuatl speaker to teach a Nahua culture course, attend our Nahuatl study sessions, and work with us as an informant. Another reason for the fertile environment for Nahuatl studies at Indiana in the 1990s was because at the same time some of us were also studying Mesoamerican pictography with Gordon Brotherston. As Fritz mentioned, another really nice thing about Indiana is that right there on campus, we had the Lilly Library's rare book and manuscript collection, which has a collection of Nahuatl documents, some of which also have accompanying picotgraphic texts. If you will permit a shameless plug at this point, I would mention that in 1997 my fellow Nahuatl students and I at Indiana published transcriptions and translations of a few short Nahuatl documents with accompanying pictographic texts in a publication along with a longer study and analysis by Gordon Brotherston titled _Footprints through time: Mexican pictorial manuscripts at the Lilly Library_ available from the Lilly Library. [I think we are all pretty pround of that publication, but if you order a copy, keep in mind that we were, and perhaps still are and always will be, novices :-)]. 3. Jonathan Amith's summer program in Mexico. I don't know very much about this program, but I have heard very good things about it from people who have participated. I would be interested to hear about Jonathan's initial formation in Nahuatl.... 4. John Sullivan, who was a student of Lockhart's, has also recently started a summer program in Zacatecas about which I have heard very good things. John has also undertaken the very ambitious project of developing a program for native speakers, devising linguistic terminology in Nahuatl so the language can be studied in Nahuatl itself, creating a Nahuatl-Nahuatl dictionary, etc. Alfonos Reyes was also very active working with students on archives of Nahuatl documents in Tlaxcala, but I don't know if this project involved Nahuatl instruction or not. There may be other programs of which I am unaware. I do know that Nahuatl is sometimes taught at other institutions in the U.S., but my impression is that in most cases not to the same extent or in the same depth as has been possible at UCLA and Indiana. The summer programs are very good good and practical, but they have the disadvantage of being limited in terms of time. And knowledge gained in that way is very perishable if it is not reinforced over longer periods of time. Both the UCLA and the Indiana groups have had the advantage of being able to study over the course of several consecutive years under the direction of Jim Lockhart and Joe Campbell respectively. I think most of the students who have come out of UCLA and Indiana, however, are historians or literature/cultural studies people. Michael was trained and works in linguistics and John has sort of become a linguist, but I think most of us who were trained in literature and/or history are constrained by the demands of the fields in which we work. As Joe knows, several of his former Indiana students like me are very interested in working more directly on Nahuatl, teaching it regularly, etc., but we also have to do what it takes to get tenure in our repsective fields. So in most cases, it becomes ancillary to our primary teaching and research programs. Of course, I should include Nahuat-l on my list as well. Everyone here already knows about Nahuat-l, but I think we all owe a tribute to Fritz for starting and maintaining it over the years. I think it has been an invaluable resource for disseminating information, requesting help and collaboration in various kinds of endeavors related to the study of Nahuatl. Best, Galen R. Joe Campbell wrote: > David, > > When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the > question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm curious > about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live on my hallway > and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and > talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation > than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. > > The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and > perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. > No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with > us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one > that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. > > It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what > they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, > who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other > branches on the tree. > > Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, > Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few > days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University > of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then > entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, > preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. > Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the > summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary > was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation > was... again, beyond belief. > > Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb > formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of > my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to > teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, > in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a > language expert and work in the course with me. We worked > together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my > learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more > years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. > > In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, > Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in > learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked > on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, > then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine > Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. > > For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various > Nahuatl dialects. > > And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor > in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl > now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. > > Iztayohmeh, > > Joe > > p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros > if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning > Nahuatl. > > Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? > > > > On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > >> Estimados listeros: >> >> I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was >> transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx Sat Jun 3 19:58:02 2006 From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright) Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 14:58:02 -0500 Subject: Schools Message-ID: Many thanks to Joe, for jumpstarting my request, and to all who came forth with their stories. I'm still quite the novice myself, but I'll go on the record and say that in spite of a couple of decades of collecting source material and superficially dabbling in Nahuatl, I finally dove in about six years ago, with the goal of translating nahuatl glosses in Otomi codices and comparing lexical items (calques) between Otomi and Nahuatl to try and work out the role of language in the multiethnic and multilinguistic culture of late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexico. The Nahuat-l list, Joe and Fran's Foundation Course notes and some tutoring by the late Cayetano Reyes García of El Colegio de Michoacán got me off and crawling (I was going to write "running" but I decided to be realistic). I managed to crack the glosses and analyze the calques, which are in an appendix to my dissertation, finished last year. To motivate myself to stick with Nahuatl, and to share the modest but useful fruits of my efforts, I offered a seminar called "Lectura del Nahuatl" to undergrad history students at the Universidad de Guanajuato last year and again this year. The groups are small but motivated, and after a semester everyone can hack out a rough translation of a few paragraphs of 16th century central Mexican Nahuatl. A big obstacle has been the lack of grammatical and lexical sources in Spanish that incorporate the phonological advances since c 1975, so I've been working on a basic Nahuatl grammar in Spanish, with a detailed system of references, combining data from Campbell/Karttunen, Andrews, Lockhart, Carochi, Rincón, Molina, Launey, and other sources. The examples are all written out twice, first in traditional "Franciscan" orthography, then in Andrews/ Campbell/ Karttunen's "traditional-phonemic" spelling, and with the International Phonetic Alphabet where necessary. The idea is to get the students used to both forms and train them to move back and forth: "ahora pongamos nuestros lentes de rayos x para ver las vocales largas y los saltillos". I'm still working the bugs out of the text and adding examples from colonial sources. David Wright www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at mac.com Wed Jun 14 01:09:52 2006 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:09:52 -0500 Subject: couenan Message-ID: Listeros who don`t like to go on vacation, A colleague of mine has asked for assistance on a matter that has me stumped. It concerns the tlamacazqui "Couenan" related to Quetzalcoatl in Cholula. What is the morphology of "couenan" and why is his gliph a "comitl" ("con-"; this makes sense) and a square? John John Sullivan, Ph.D. Profesor de lengua y cultura nahua Unidad Académica de Idiomas Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas Director Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. Tacuba 152, int. 47 Centro Histórico Zacatecas, Zac. 98000 México Oficina: +52 (492) 925-3415 Fax: +52 (492) 925-3416 Domicilio: +52 (492) 768-6048 Celular: +52 (492) 544-5985 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From campbel at indiana.edu Fri Jun 2 03:32:05 2006 From: campbel at indiana.edu (R. Joe Campbell) Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:32:05 -0400 Subject: Schools In-Reply-To: <0IZM00HK7K5C8Y@smtp.prodigy.net.mx> Message-ID: David, When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm curious about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live on my hallway and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other branches on the tree. Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation was... again, beyond belief. Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a language expert and work in the course with me. We worked together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various Nahuatl dialects. And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. Iztayohmeh, Joe p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning Nahuatl. Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > Estimados listeros: > > I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was > transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Fri Jun 2 11:53:11 2006 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 07:53:11 -0400 Subject: Fwd: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools Message-ID: ----- Forwarded message from mmccaffe at indiana.edu ----- Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 07:51:33 -0400 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu Reply-To: mmccaffe at indiana.edu Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools To: "R. Joe Campbell" In grad school I wanted to take a language of the Americas. There was only Zapotec and Nahuatl offered that semester. Before the semester started I called the Zapotec teacher and he wasn't home. I called the Nahuatl teacher, Joe Campbell, and he was home, and he was enthusiastic about teaching the course. So, I signed up. Then i spent two semesters daily with Joe in a Nahuatl class with one other student. It was the best class i ever took, hands down. By the second semester we were reading the Florentine codex. After that i studied Andrews and Thelma Sullivan, Carochi, on my own, and a few others. Then a few years later, I taught Nahuatl to three successive beginning groups and two advanced groups at Indiana. When the money dried up, I joined a "Nahuatl circle" that includes Joe and Pablo Garcia, my best student. That's my story. Michael McCafferty Quoting "R. Joe Campbell" : > David, > > When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the > question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm > curious about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live > on my hallway > and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and > talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation > than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. > > The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and > perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. > No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with > us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one > that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. > > It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what > they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, > who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other > branches on the tree. > > Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, > Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few > days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University > of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then > entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, > preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. > Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the > summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary > was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation > was... again, beyond belief. > > Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb > formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of > my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to > teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, > in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a > language expert and work in the course with me. We worked > together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my > learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more > years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. > > In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, > Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in > learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked > on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, > then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine > Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. > > For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various > Nahuatl dialects. > > And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor > in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl > now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. > > Iztayohmeh, > > Joe > > p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros > if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning > Nahuatl. > > Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? > > > > On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > >> Estimados listeros: >> >> I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was >> transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From b.leeming at rivers.org Fri Jun 2 12:29:27 2006 From: b.leeming at rivers.org (b.leeming at rivers.org) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:29:27 -0400 Subject: Schools Message-ID: Listeros- I, too, have been following this thread closely and have enjoyed reading individual's tales of learning Nahuatl. My introduction to Nahuatl came through research I did last year under the supervision of Dav?d Carrasco at Harvard. (I wrote my graduate thesis on the so-called Testerian catechisms used in the evangelization of the indigenous population of Mexico.) Since then I have been working (slowly!) through Lockhart's "Nahuatl As Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl." However, without the aid of a master teacher or even a group of like-minded students, the going has been very slow. So, my question is: Short of attending a summer program in Mexico (travel is difficult right now due to young children), does anyone know of a Nahuatl scholar in the Boston, MA area or can anyone connect me with others in this part of the country who have an interest in learning Nahuatl? Thank you! Ben Leeming The Rivers School Weston, MA _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at nantucket.net Fri Jun 2 10:42:02 2006 From: karttu at nantucket.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 06:42:02 -0400 Subject: How I got to Nahuatl Message-ID: When I was a brand-new Indiana University grad student in linguistics, Joe Campbell was a brand-new assistant professor. I took a course in the history of linguistics from Joe, but we didn't do any Nahuatl then. Since those days, we have become firm friends and colleagues and had our share of adventures in Mexico. In 1967-68, while I was an NSF pre-doc fellow in computational linguistics at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, I met Jim Lockhart, who also lived in Santa Monica. From there I moved on to the University of Texas, Austin, where I held a series of research positions in linguistics. Shortly after that Jim relocated from UCLA to UT-Austin for a brief time before returning to UCLA. While in Austin he approached me with a problem: The archives of Mexico are stuffed with indigenous-language documents, probably vital to any colonial Latin-American historian like Jim, but there were no organized courses teaching these languages. The language of the largest number of these colonial documents is Nahuatl. Jim asked me as a linguist about how one approaches such a language. As it turned out, it was Jim who did the intensive leading over the next several years. I went to Finland on a Fulbright research fellowship and then on to MIT for a year. In the meantime Jim went back to UCLA. From there on, we carried on most of our collaboration by xerox machine and the USPS. Jim flooded me with transcriptions and provisional translations and sent me photo-copies of many significant works such as the facsimile of Carochi 1645. I would never have gotten anywhere without his immense generosity. After I got back to UT-Austin, I made a trip to Mexico City while Jim was there on sabbatical carrying on archival research. He introduced me to the Mexico City nahuatlahtos such as Miguel Le?n Portilla and his wife Chonita, Fernando Horcasitas, Thelma Sullivan, Nigel Davies, and others. I also met Fritz Schwaller on my first visit to Mexico. Later I met Fred Nagel and even more nahuatlahtos in Mexico. In the States Jim provided me with a letter of introduction to Arthur Anderson, which was a huge privilege. Together Jim and I combed Mexico City book stores for more books. And one day, when I was visiting the National Archives and had some waiting to do while Jim worked on something or other, he ordered up a Nahuatl manscript to occupy me. It turned out that without ever having taken a paleography course, I had a knack for transcribing colonial Nahuatl. I even cracked a hard nut that Thelma had been chewing on for a long time. During that brief time Jim and I produced Nahuatl in the Middle Years, connecting the Classical Nahuatl of Olmos, Molina, Carochi, et al., with the modern studies of spoken Nahuatl via material drawn from the colonial documents. Also, Joe Campbell had by this time moved to UT-San Antonio, and Elizabeth Hill (later Boone) and I were burning up IH-35 visiting Joe at least once a week to work with him and his computerized Nahuatl teaching material. Like Jim Lockhart, Joe was unstinting in his generosity with Nahuatl material. I carted home wheelbarrows full of computer print-out from his fieldwork. Later Joe let me build on the basis of his computerized Nahuatl lessons to produce the notebook Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar, copies of which Fritz Schwaller has so faithfully distributed over these many years. In the mid 1970s I went to Tepoztlan to live with a local family and maintained my connections in Tepoztlan for many years. I also had the privilege of going out on interviewing trips with Joe, and once I made a trip up to the Huasteca with Karen Dakin, who has been a good friend and fellow linguist. Jim and I once made a trip deep into the hinterland of Guererro to visit Una Canger, who was living and working there. It became clear from the grammar of J. Richard Andrews plus our by-now-well-worn copies of Carochi that a modern dictionary of Nahuatl showing distinctive vowel length and segmental glottal stop was greatly needed, and that my abilities in computational data processing and linguistic analysis would make me the logical person to do it. I got a series of NSF grants to do An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl and an NEH grant to do a book about the Bancroft huehuehtlahtolli co-authored with Jim Lockhart. I went back to Finland during this time, so much of the Nahuatl dictionary was compiled in a lake-side cottage in the Finnish countryside. Joe left UTSA, but by this time my own Nahuatl work--some co-authored with Jim, some co-authored with Joe, and the rest done on my own--continued unchecked. Part of the impetus for the work came from the unfailing support of Fermando Horasitas (whose death left us bereft), Thelma Sullivan, Yolanda Lastra, and Miguel Leon-Portilla and Ascension H. de L-P (Chonita). One of the fascinating people in Nahuatl studies is do?a Luz Jim?nez, who worked with Fernando Horcasitas. I did not have the good fortune to meet do?a Luz in life, but through her Nahuatl compositions, I felt as though she was an intellectual mother. Joe and I interviewed members of her family, and I wrote her career biography as part of my book Between Worlds. Since then we have enjoyed an especially warm and close relationship with Jes?s Villanueva, the grandson of do?a Luz, who has recently produced a CD about her life and work. At UT-Austin I directed two NEH Summer Institutes at while Joe and I and Alberto Zepeda taught Nahuatl. Alberto was a brilliant teacher and a dear friend, and we were devastated when he died of leukemia. Among the many wonderful participants in those NEH institutes was John Charlot, whose father--the painter Jean Charlot--had been particularly close to do?a Luz in the 1920s and maintained a close connection through letters after he moved to New York and eventually to Hawaii. Because of the letters from Luz to Charlot that are archived at the U. of Hawaii-Manoa, I spent an academic year in Hawaii, and my connections through that year and with the Charlot family have been very fruitful. When my husband retired from UT-Austin, I took early retirement, and we left Texas. Shortly thereafter, completely out of the blue, I was contacted by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, who was seeking help with creating a libretto for an opera about the Conquest of Mexico that had been commissioned for the Prague National Opera. His concept was for the Spaniards to sing in 16th-century Spanish, the Aztecs to sing in Classical Nahuatl, and the character of do?a Marina, the Nahua interpreter for Cort?s, to interpret to the opera's audience what was going on. After I worked for Lorenzo as a consultant for a while, he generously suggested we share credit as co-librettists. The opera had its premiere in Prague in March 2005, and we hope it will find many other venues in the near future. Most recently I recorded a podcast about do?a Marina ("la Malinche") for NuestraFamiliaUnida. Frances Karttunen _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at morris.umn.edu Fri Jun 2 13:38:41 2006 From: schwallr at morris.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:38:41 -0500 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: Colleagues, At the risk of being repetitious, my story is not really that exciting. Like Fran Karttunen and Michael McCafferty, I was a graduate student at Indiana University. Unlike them, I was studying colonial Mexican history. My advisor, John Lombardi, suggested that learning Nahuatl might be of great utility in my research. It just so happened that IU was a federally funded Latin American Studies center and offered Nahuatl, and other native languages, which qualified for federal assistance under the National Defense Foreign Language Act. So my second year of graduate work I earned a fellowship to learn Nahuatl under the direction of Joe Campbell. It was one of those transformative experiences. Joe was/is so passionate about the language that it was impossible not to get sucked in. My fondest memories are of making glossaries of Nahuatl words that we would then enter on to punch cards to form Joe's data base. We read the Horcasitas folk tales, and then worked on individual entries in the Molina dictionary. After about 2 years with Joe, I even had the temerity to offer Nahuatl at IU through the popular university program. I used to joke that I learned Nahuatl from a computer, programmed by Joe. I also recall that when I tried to read Sahagun it seemed the most difficult and impenetrable thing I had ever seen. As a graduate student I began to catalogue Nahuatl language manuscripts in the US, working first with the collection at the Lilly Library. In 1974, I met Jim Lockhart, and got to know Fran Karttunen, as I provided minimal archival assistance in finding colonial Nahuatl documents. I then went on to a career as a history and Spanish prof. At every institution where I have worked, I have taught Nahuatl, Florida Atlantic University, the U. of Montana, and here at the U. of Minnesota. Once I became an administrator and archival research became more difficult because of my "day job," I have turned more and more to Nahuatl. It's something I can work on in my spare moments. Also in the mid-1980s I received funding from NEH to develop a catalogue of Nahuatl language manuscripts in the US, which was eventually published by the Academy of American Franciscan History. Also in the mid-80's at the behest of Marc Eisinger of France, I initiated this discussion list. It makes it one of the oldest lists around, having begun during the precursor to the internet, bitnet. I also developed www.nahuatl.org, which unfortunately languishes from time to time due to my commitments elsewhere. As Fran pointed out, I make copies of the "Foundation Course" available. Right now it is out of print, but when I get to Potsdam, NY, I'll have more copies printed and it will be for sale once again. I have worked on the Guide to Confession written by Bartolome de Alva, on some of the cofradia constitutions of Molina, and recently I have been looking at nuances in Sahagun's Psalmodia and Coloquios. Ironically I now find Sahagun to be quite clear and straightforward and use selections for readings when I teach Nahuatl. I must give my deepest thanks to Joe Campbell and certainly to Fran Karttunen. Without them I would never have persisted in Nahuatl as long as I have. Their passion for the language has certainly inspired me. John F. Schwaller President SUNY Potsdam schwaljf at potsdam.edu Until 6-30-06: University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at morris.umn.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com Fri Jun 2 15:08:20 2006 From: MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com (Maria) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:08:20 -0700 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: I forgot to mention. At UCSD, where I got my PhD, I only knew John Sullivan who was interested in N?huatl. I believe he had a very hard time convincing his professors there could be a specialty in N?huatl or at least a graduate student working in a doctoral dissertation in N?huatl. Beyond that there was not an interest in American Languages at all. I am speaking for the field of Cultural Studies and Literature. In linguistics the interest died. In my times Linguistics was into the Natural Approach, with massive offerings in Spanish and less in French, German, Italian and Russian. Again, little Mandarin and Japanese. Those who specialized in Mexico did it on interesting fields, like Jewish Mexican Literature and other aspects of culture having little to do with Old Mexico. As a Mexicanist, I felt sad the majority of advisors suggested and even induced students to focus on Modern Mexico and literatures gravitating around Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Jos? Emilio Pacheco (if lucky). So N?huatl, totally out of the question. Maria Bolivar "We don?t see things as they are, We see things as we are." Anais Nin Dr. Mar?a Dolores Bol?var MBOLIVAR at san.rr.com http://geografiaserrantes.com/laruda/ http://geografiaserrantes.com/imaginomios/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com Fri Jun 2 15:06:30 2006 From: MDBOLIVAR at san.rr.com (Maria) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:06:30 -0700 Subject: How Nahuatl found me Message-ID: Joe, we should seriously work in compiling in some form all these testimonies. I am always interested about people who decide to learn other languages, whatever language they may choose. The more I teach or work with languages I realize those of us who learn languages belong in an endangered group. In the community college, today, even Spanish classes that used to be packed are losing numbers. German is no longer taught. There are only two or three courses available in Arabic. Japanese and Mandarin have one or two sections, not more than that. My students they fall in two general categories. Those who see the importance of learning languages but are caught up in the business of having someone teach them and not learning it themselves. The other group is made of those who realize -of course I want to be counted among this bunch- learning a language involves a life endeavor, a daily effort made of heroic acts of loyalty to the task. I have wanted to enroll in an Arabic class, for instance, since about a month ago, and the possibilities are so few my project doesn't even seem realistic, to anybody. The ones I have found are advanced, which tells me they are geared for the children of Arabic speakers who want to recuperate what they have lost. Believe it or not, the only online possibility I found came from Montana State University. I frankly was appalled to learn the interest for Arabic in Montana exceeded San Diego's. As for N?huatl... Two years ago I found in San Marcos, desperate to do something more than work the fields for a minimum wage, a teacher/poet of N?huatl. I sent a wide invitation to form a group and come up with a decent pay for him. IT would have amounted to a hundred to two hundred dollars per person, per semester, even less, depending on how many joined. I really thought at least ten people would show up, eager to learn. I was too optimistic. Not one person showed up. Many responded, I must say. There were plenty of good deeds and good excuses. Lack of time was number one. A lot said they were not sure that they could give themselves two hours a week for as long as they needed to learn "such a difficult" language. I asked the teacher to stay put and be patient. I thought I needed to be more persuasive. I offered to pitch in with a demo lesson so everyone would be happy and motivated. I did schedule it, not a soul showed up. They wrote to me that second time, and promised, provided I organized it on a weekend, to come next time. End result, the teacher got discouraged and never called again. I have known two teachers who knew N?huatl and could share their knowledge practically. I tried signing up to go to Morelos, to spend the summer. But I was told my children could not come -at the time 5 and 7. The trip meant camping out and sleeping in places they did not think appropriate for children. I know we would have loved it but they did not think so. Maybe they thought we would be too picky. So all the N?huatl I have learned I have learned it pretty much on my own. Almost like I learned Latin, to keep it in my box of treasures and share it once every life. I work both for the Community College and for San Diego State University. I have tried convincing them to teach N?huatl and/or Pur?pecha and find out if there is an interest. They decline graciously my invitation. I have interviewed hundreds of workers from Latin American Countries. I know there are a lot of Mayan speakers, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Pur?pecha. It would be great if there could be a conscious drive to show how these languages count and that it is important to spread and document their existence. But often I find myself alone in thinking this way. It would be nice to find a group in the San Diego area of people who want to become active speakers. If you have the said references send them to me. I offer my place to start that circle. I will provide the coffee, the music, the candles, the materials, the housekeeping, everything to do that. I have all the books and materials you can possibly think, and I will start a group with as many as another person for as long as it takes us both to recruit any one else. Maria Bolivar "We don?t see things as they are, We see things as we are." Anais Nin Dr. Mar?a Dolores Bol?var MBOLIVAR at san.rr.com http://geografiaserrantes.com/laruda/ http://geografiaserrantes.com/imaginomios/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 2 19:20:31 2006 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 15:20:31 -0400 Subject: Schools Message-ID: I've always been curious about how and where Andrews learned Nahuatl. It was my understanding that he taught in the Spanish and Portuguese dept. at Vanderbilt with a primary specialization in Medieval and/or Golden Age literature. In the introduction to his book he says that he first taught it in 1967 or somewhere close to that. Does anybody know where he studied Nahuatl? Did he learn it on his own? And what about Anderson and Dibble? Did they study in Mexico City? I guess metaphorically speaking, I'm sort of on the same floor as Joe, but he made me feel guilty for not responding. So although what I have to say may be a little redundant and in some cases maybe obvious, here is my two cents. I don't know that much about the teaching of Nahuatl in Mexico City, but outside of Mexico City and in the US over the last few decades, I think there have been/are at least four major sources/centers of Nahuatl teaching/learning for non-native speakers. 1. As everyone probably knows, Lockhart has probably produced the greatest number of scholars who go on to produce translations and use Nahuatl in historical research. If you come across someone who works with Nahuatl and got their Ph.D. from UCLA or in some cases even from universities near by there as in John's case, then it is likely that they studied with him. My impression is that Lockhart's students are primarily interested in the language as a tool of historical research, but there are a few exceptions (see #4). I think Lockhart's group has produced several people who have been producing translations, because this kind of thing was integrated into their graduate training and often as part of their dissertation research program. 2. As Joe already mentioned, he has been teaching Nahuatl at Indiana for many years and he is a very generous contributor to Nahuat-l. Michael and Fritz have already mentioned that they studied with Joe. There are also several other people who studied with Joe, like me, who participate to one degree or another on this list but haven't necessarily made new scholarly contributions to knowledge of the language or been influential in producing new generations of Nahuatl scholars (at least not yet). In the case of Nahuatl studies at Indiana, I think there have been different times at which there was a convergence of the stars or alignment of the planets or something during which there have been higher levels of activity and interest. As Michael has explained, there has been one such period of interest and activity recently with Pablo. While I was there from the mid to late 1990s was another such period originally made possible in part by a government grant in the Center for Latin American Studies, but also strengthened and extended as a result of a group of really interested and motivated students (Jongsoo Lee, Mark Morris, and me). I say "really interested" because, you have to be really interested in order to survive the rigor of Joe's classes (I don't think he will mind me saying this). His formal courses are very intense and demanding, but the experience is also very rewarding. And even after completing all the formal coursework that the funding allows, he generously volunteers to continue working in a regular study session mode with students who are interested. At one point, we were also fortunate to be able to bring in a Mexican scholar and native Nahuatl speaker to teach a Nahua culture course, attend our Nahuatl study sessions, and work with us as an informant. Another reason for the fertile environment for Nahuatl studies at Indiana in the 1990s was because at the same time some of us were also studying Mesoamerican pictography with Gordon Brotherston. As Fritz mentioned, another really nice thing about Indiana is that right there on campus, we had the Lilly Library's rare book and manuscript collection, which has a collection of Nahuatl documents, some of which also have accompanying picotgraphic texts. If you will permit a shameless plug at this point, I would mention that in 1997 my fellow Nahuatl students and I at Indiana published transcriptions and translations of a few short Nahuatl documents with accompanying pictographic texts in a publication along with a longer study and analysis by Gordon Brotherston titled _Footprints through time: Mexican pictorial manuscripts at the Lilly Library_ available from the Lilly Library. [I think we are all pretty pround of that publication, but if you order a copy, keep in mind that we were, and perhaps still are and always will be, novices :-)]. 3. Jonathan Amith's summer program in Mexico. I don't know very much about this program, but I have heard very good things about it from people who have participated. I would be interested to hear about Jonathan's initial formation in Nahuatl.... 4. John Sullivan, who was a student of Lockhart's, has also recently started a summer program in Zacatecas about which I have heard very good things. John has also undertaken the very ambitious project of developing a program for native speakers, devising linguistic terminology in Nahuatl so the language can be studied in Nahuatl itself, creating a Nahuatl-Nahuatl dictionary, etc. Alfonos Reyes was also very active working with students on archives of Nahuatl documents in Tlaxcala, but I don't know if this project involved Nahuatl instruction or not. There may be other programs of which I am unaware. I do know that Nahuatl is sometimes taught at other institutions in the U.S., but my impression is that in most cases not to the same extent or in the same depth as has been possible at UCLA and Indiana. The summer programs are very good good and practical, but they have the disadvantage of being limited in terms of time. And knowledge gained in that way is very perishable if it is not reinforced over longer periods of time. Both the UCLA and the Indiana groups have had the advantage of being able to study over the course of several consecutive years under the direction of Jim Lockhart and Joe Campbell respectively. I think most of the students who have come out of UCLA and Indiana, however, are historians or literature/cultural studies people. Michael was trained and works in linguistics and John has sort of become a linguist, but I think most of us who were trained in literature and/or history are constrained by the demands of the fields in which we work. As Joe knows, several of his former Indiana students like me are very interested in working more directly on Nahuatl, teaching it regularly, etc., but we also have to do what it takes to get tenure in our repsective fields. So in most cases, it becomes ancillary to our primary teaching and research programs. Of course, I should include Nahuat-l on my list as well. Everyone here already knows about Nahuat-l, but I think we all owe a tribute to Fritz for starting and maintaining it over the years. I think it has been an invaluable resource for disseminating information, requesting help and collaboration in various kinds of endeavors related to the study of Nahuatl. Best, Galen R. Joe Campbell wrote: > David, > > When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the > question -- I would like to know the answers. Why? Because I'm curious > about the house I live in. I know a lot of people who live on my hallway > and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and > talk for a while. But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation > than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service. > > The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and > perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming. > No! Iztlacapahtiliztli!! Bernard shared a genealogical fact with > us and I appreciated that. Now, surely *someone* has another one > that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves. > > It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what > they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl, > who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other > branches on the tree. > > Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl. My professor, > Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few > days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University > of Illinois. He totally assimilated it in a few days and then > entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant, > preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan. > Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the > summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary > was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation > was... again, beyond belief. > > Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb > formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of > my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to > teach a series of NDEA funded courses. I went to Hueyapan, > in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a > language expert and work in the course with me. We worked > together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my > learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more > years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew. > > In 1974 I started working on translating Molina, > Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in > learning a little more. And from 1974 to 1985, I worked > on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary, > then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine > Codex. ...and on ...and on ...and on. > > For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various > Nahuatl dialects. > > And I'm still learning. OK, I never had a classroom professor > in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl > now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale. > > Iztayohmeh, > > Joe > > p.s. For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros > if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning > Nahuatl. > > Who is currently teaching it? Where? What variety of Nahuatl? > > > > On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote: > >> Estimados listeros: >> >> I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was >> transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century. > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx Sat Jun 3 19:58:02 2006 From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright) Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 14:58:02 -0500 Subject: Schools Message-ID: Many thanks to Joe, for jumpstarting my request, and to all who came forth with their stories. I'm still quite the novice myself, but I'll go on the record and say that in spite of a couple of decades of collecting source material and superficially dabbling in Nahuatl, I finally dove in about six years ago, with the goal of translating nahuatl glosses in Otomi codices and comparing lexical items (calques) between Otomi and Nahuatl to try and work out the role of language in the multiethnic and multilinguistic culture of late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexico. The Nahuat-l list, Joe and Fran's Foundation Course notes and some tutoring by the late Cayetano Reyes Garc?a of El Colegio de Michoac?n got me off and crawling (I was going to write "running" but I decided to be realistic). I managed to crack the glosses and analyze the calques, which are in an appendix to my dissertation, finished last year. To motivate myself to stick with Nahuatl, and to share the modest but useful fruits of my efforts, I offered a seminar called "Lectura del Nahuatl" to undergrad history students at the Universidad de Guanajuato last year and again this year. The groups are small but motivated, and after a semester everyone can hack out a rough translation of a few paragraphs of 16th century central Mexican Nahuatl. A big obstacle has been the lack of grammatical and lexical sources in Spanish that incorporate the phonological advances since c 1975, so I've been working on a basic Nahuatl grammar in Spanish, with a detailed system of references, combining data from Campbell/Karttunen, Andrews, Lockhart, Carochi, Rinc?n, Molina, Launey, and other sources. The examples are all written out twice, first in traditional "Franciscan" orthography, then in Andrews/ Campbell/ Karttunen's "traditional-phonemic" spelling, and with the International Phonetic Alphabet where necessary. The idea is to get the students used to both forms and train them to move back and forth: "ahora pongamos nuestros lentes de rayos x para ver las vocales largas y los saltillos". I'm still working the bugs out of the text and adding examples from colonial sources. David Wright www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at mac.com Wed Jun 14 01:09:52 2006 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:09:52 -0500 Subject: couenan Message-ID: Listeros who don`t like to go on vacation, A colleague of mine has asked for assistance on a matter that has me stumped. It concerns the tlamacazqui "Couenan" related to Quetzalcoatl in Cholula. What is the morphology of "couenan" and why is his gliph a "comitl" ("con-"; this makes sense) and a square? John John Sullivan, Ph.D. Profesor de lengua y cultura nahua Unidad Acad?mica de Idiomas Universidad Aut?noma de Zacatecas Director Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Tacuba 152, int. 47 Centro Hist?rico Zacatecas, Zac. 98000 M?xico Oficina: +52 (492) 925-3415 Fax: +52 (492) 925-3416 Domicilio: +52 (492) 768-6048 Celular: +52 (492) 544-5985 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl