Rejoinder to Whitaker (Cross-post from Aztlan)

[Michael McCafferty]

Thank you, Dr. Pennock, for your posting. I appreciate the ideas.

Michael

Quoting "Dodds Pennock, Dr C.E." <ced22 at leicester.ac.uk>:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I share Michael's hesitation regarding an unidentified post. If we do
> not know the agenda or expertise of a poster then it is hard to know
> how to assess their work. I think perhaps we should be tolerant of
> writing in a language other than the post was composed unless we fear
> a political agenda, however. I myself am guilty of replying in
> English occasionally where the principal language of the discussion
> is Spanish for the simple fact that, whilst my reading Spanish is
> pretty good, my written Spanish is laborious! I suspect this may well
> be the case in reverse for some Spanish speakers.
>
> I think perhaps Michael is right to fear a political agenda here,
> however. Much of the post is too obviously polemical and at times
> bordering on personal attack to invite serious criticism (the
> comparison with Stalin and the Nazis most notably!) and I fear that
> some of the latter part of the post misunderstand's the linguistic
> focus of Gordon's email.
>
> Some of the early parts of this post are obviously drawn from the
> well-known article of Miguel León-Portilla, whose credibility is
> hardly in doubt, but certainly not all. The inference that all these
> documents are somehow essentially unreliable ("Todos los documentos
> que se pueden citar en uno u otro sentido son coloniales aunque sean
> escritos en nahuatl o de forma bilingue nahuatl español.") is
> basically applicable to any alphabetic text drawn from this period
> and would dismiss the possibility of any use of any post-conquest
> alphabetic documents. Although care must certainly be taken in the
> use of such documents, I do not believe so sweeping a case is made by
> any serious scholar and one which León-Portilla's own work directly
> contradicts.
>
> Yours,
> Caroline
> -------
> Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock
> Lecturer in Early Modern History
> School of Historical Studies
> University of Leicester
> University Road
> Leicester
> LE1 7RH
>
> email: ced22 at le.ac.uk
> http://www.le.ac.uk/history/people/ced22.html




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