mohottah

[John F. Schwaller]

I guess I must have been earlier than I thought since I studied in 1972-74
with Joe.   Tlahzocamati huel miac.



>
> Joe,
>
> You forgot to mention the fact that from 1970 until after 2000 at
> Indiana University so many scholars now working with the language cut
> their Nahuatl teeth on your table.
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>
> Quoting "Campbell,  R. Joe" <campbel at indiana.edu>:
>
>> 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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>>
>
>
>
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-- 
John F. Schwaller
President,
SUNY Potsdam
44 Pierrepont Ave.
Potsdam, NY  13676
schwallr at potsdam.edu


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