mohottah

[Michael McCafferty]

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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