mohottah

[Campbell, R. Joe]

Nocnihuan,

   I thought that I should probably clarify my use of the word 
"teachers" in my learning Nahuatl.  I have to confess that I have never 
had a formal class in the language.  By "teachers" in this context, I 
refer to the various native speakers who have helped me make progress.
   In 1962, I went to Tepoztlan, Morelos, as a member of a group of 
graduate students under the guidance of Ken Hale, then a young 
professor at the University of Illinois.  He placed a group of four in 
the small nearby village of San Andres and helped Paul Puritt and me to 
find living space in Tepoztlan.  Ken introduced me to a Nahuatl 
speaker, who was a veteran of the Revolution, in fact, who had fought 
with Zapata.  I sat down with him and started asking for single word 
translations and repeating them as I made notes... That didn't work, 
since he had little patience for someone who mangled his words, failing 
miserably on the syllable-final [h], a frequent modern result of the 
historical glottal stop.

   Don Juanito and I remained good friends, made trips together, had 
long chats with beer on my porch, but Paul and I found someone else to 
help us through the hour-by-hour work all summer -- a sixteen year old 
girl (and sometimes her father) from nearby Santa Catarina.

   When Indiana University wanted someone to teach Nahuatl in 1970, I 
accepted the assignment with the understanding that they would pay a 
native speaker to co-teach the class in a field methods format.  The 
young woman who spent an academic year in Bloomington was extremely 
communicative (and very instrumental in my learning more Nahuatl) as we 
spent many hours each week planning out "safe" areas of the language to 
present in class.  It was she who clarified for me the function of 
reduplication in Nahuatl verbs through her hopping.

   Through the 1980s, I spent time in Cuernavaca and Taxco, looking for 
people who spoke the Guerrero Balsas Valley Nahuatl.  One person who 
spent a lot of time with me was an elderly vendor from Ameyaltepec.  
And in Taxco, a family from San Agustin Oapan seemed to adopt me, with 
the young son abandoning his family work of painting amates and tending 
their vending stall to spend mountains of time with me and my tape 
recorder, acting as my "point man" in trips to outlying towns, and even 
getting me to wade barefoot in the Balsas River, helping him with the 
fishing nets.

   In 1989 and 1992 I worked with a native speaker from Canoa, Puebla, 
the late Alberto Zepeda, in co-teaching a course on his dialect during 
Fran's NEH Institutes.  On Friday before the classes were to start on 
Monday, I told him that I didn't know anything about Canoa Nahuatl, but 
that by Monday we had to be ready to teach a class together as if I 
did.  And we repeated our co-teaching act at the University of Chicago 
summer school in 1996.  I can't imagine a more intense language 
learning experience than those three summers.

   In the Spring semester of 1998, a speaker of the Tlaxcallan dialect 
came to Bloomington and stayed well into the Summer.  We visited each 
other's classes
and became good friends, resulting in our sweating through the heat of 
a sun-heated limestone building with no air-conditioning for weeks and 
weeks to translate Gonzalez Casanova's _Cuentos Indigenas_ into 
Tlaxcallan Nahuatl.

   These people have been my most important teachers of Nahuatl.  Not 
all of them had a teaching certificate, but that didn't diminish the 
effect of their teaching on me.

   David's example of vowel-learning in the midst of sharing food 
reminds me that many of you have undoubtedly had similar experiences.

   I would be amiss if I didn't mention two members of the Franciscan Order:
Fray Alonso de Molina and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.  They have both 
been generous beyond the Call in the innumerable hours that they have 
spent with me.

Joe



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