Hello

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting Doug Barr <lingoman at mac.com>:

> Hello, all -
>
> I've always been fascinated by languages, and recently came across
> Nahuatl - I'm hooked! Diving into it already thanks to the surprising
>  amount of information out there...
>
> Got a couple of quick linguistic questions for anyone who can answer
> them (these are about the Classical language as that's the only one I
>  have materials for).
>
> 1. Do long vowels have a different quality from short vowels, or are
> they simply pronounced twice as long?

I'm pretty sure one cannot say "twice as long" but they do have a 
distinctive, discernible length, and therefore are phonemic in 
character. Such vowel-length contrasts are common in American 
languages, as in the Algonquian family, e.g., Miami-Illinois /nipi/ 
'water' but /niipi/ 'my arrow'. But, even in Algonquian, the minimal 
pair lists are not long. Interesting.


And, are there very many
> minimal pairs for vowel length? I've seen "metztli" "foot" and
> "me:tztli" "moon," but that's the only minimal pair for vowel length
> that I've seen, so far.

There are not many, but more than that. Joe, do you have a list?
One common verb contrast that comes to mind is /toka/ 'follow, chase' 
but /tooka/ 'bury, plant'. Both, of course, are spelled "toca".




> 2. Verbs with third-person subject and object that are of the same
> number, i.e. both singular or both plural - if there's only one noun
> argument, is there a default reading for subject or object? E.g. does
>  "O:quitta in cihua:tl" mean "The woman saw him/her," "He/she saw the
>  woman," or both/either?

Fundamentally, it means both. It also can mean "the woman saw them" 
(inanimate object plural).


> 3. I know that the modern languages are different enough from each
> other to make inter-comprehension difficult, I'm curious to know how
> inter-intelligible any of the modern languages are with the classical
>  language. Are the differences as great as, say, between Latin and
> the  modern Romance languages?

There are those who know better than I, but my impressionism is that, 
even with the heavy Spanish overlay, the Nahuatl *dialects* are not as 
divergent from "classical" Nahuatl as the modern Romance *languages* 
from Latin. Of course, the Romance languages have had more time to 
develop along their divergent tracks. Nahuatl dialects, strictly 
speaking, have been going down different tracks for much shorter time. 
The sixteen hundreds are not that long ago.

Michael McCafferty


>
> Thanks, and I hope to learn lots!
>
> Doug Barr
>
> 'S fhearr an saoghal ionnsachadh na sheachnadh. Better to teach (or
> learn) the world than shun it. (Gaelic proverb)
>
>



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