From david_becraft at hotmail.com Wed Sep 1 03:10:49 2010 From: david_becraft at hotmail.com (pancho Becraft) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:10:49 -0700 Subject: Nahuatl/etc on official notices? In-Reply-To: <246F8F45-5B36-42EB-AB65-C2B4FE42F8A8@comcast.net> Message-ID: I think there are Mexicanero and Tepehua signs in Mezquital county of Southern Durango (San Pedro Jicora?) Pancho From: karttu at comcast.net Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:34:53 -0400 To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Nahuatl/etc on official notices? There has been a project to do this in Milpa Alta. Have a look at this site: sites.google.com/site/milpaalta/home The contact person is Silverio Jiménez Audiffred (teztla at gmail.com) Fran On Aug 29, 2010, at 6:34 PM, ANTHONY APPLEYARD wrote: In Mexico, are there any areas where direction signs and public notices and suchlike are duplicated in Nahuatl or some other local indigenous language? I have seen many such signs and notices in Wales duplicated in Welsh. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From tom_grigsby at yahoo.com Wed Sep 1 02:48:08 2010 From: tom_grigsby at yahoo.com (grigsby tom) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:48:08 -0700 Subject: atzontzompantla (sic) Message-ID: Estimados listeros,    I sent an email to one of my friends in the village regarding Atzontzompantla? (sic!) and got the following response:    Segun Don M y Doña Al, que son los que pude preguntar lo correcto es Atzotzonpantla. Lo demas es modismos o deformaciones de la gente popular que al no saber el idioma nahuatl pronuncian palabras de acuerdo a como lo escuchan, o se acostumbra con el tiempo a escucharlo.      Digging around on Google I found this in :    Cuauhtinchan Map Number 2 by Keido Yoneda publicar CIESAS 2005 p.226    -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From a.appleyard at btinternet.com Wed Sep 1 16:11:29 2010 From: a.appleyard at btinternet.com (ANTHONY APPLEYARD) Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 16:11:29 +0000 Subject: Nahuatl/etc on official notices? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Again, the nearest to this that I am familiar with here in Britain is Welsh in Wales, and in many areas in Wales just about all road signs etc are in both languages, e.g. ARAF = SLOW, DIM PARCIO = NO PARKING, etc. --- On Wed, 1/9/10, pancho Becraft wrote: I think there are Mexicanero and Tepehua signs in Mezquital county of Southern Durango (San Pedro Jicora?) Pancho -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Thu Sep 2 18:20:34 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 13:20:34 -0500 Subject: a big favor Message-ID: Listeros, I have a problem. At IDIEZ we are developing a text (vs morphology) based textbook for learning Classical Nahuatl, in which the orthography of the readings will be standardized to the Andrews-Karttunen-Campbell system. I have most of the works I need, but I seem to have misplaced Clineʻs "Book of Tributes". Iʻm going to re-acquire it in October when Iʻm in the US, but I really need some of the material now for curriculum development. If anyone has the work and wouldnʻt mind scanning about 5 pages of the Nahuatl and sending it to me, I would really appreciate it! On another note, yesterday we hit 7000 headwords in our monolingual dictionary. John John Sullivan, Ph.D. Professor of Nahua language and culture Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas Zacatecas Institute of Teaching and Research in Ethnology Tacuba 152, int. 43 Centro Histórico Zacatecas, Zac. 98000 Mexico Work: +52 (492) 925-3415 Fax: +1 (858) 724-3030 (U.S.A.) Home: +52 (492) 768-6048 Mobile: +52 1 (492) 103-0195 idiez at me.com www.macehualli.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Tue Sep 21 23:59:15 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2010 08:59:15 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings Message-ID: Hiya. I'm a fairly accomplished self-taught linguist. I've managed to teach myself three world languages by travelling, reading, and studying grammar. For my next language, I want to study Classical Nahuatl. From reading reviews of various books I have pretty much settled on Nahuatl as Written. If anyone has another recommendation, I'd be pleased to hear it. I am also very keen to find some recordings. Any duration or subject matter will do. A recording of an important text being read aloud would be ideal, but I am willing to settle for recordings of which there is no written correlative. I am not interested in recordings that are meant explicitly to teach you something, ie ones that go over common phrases or points of grammar, but I would be interested in any others (stories) and they wouldn't need to be Classical Nahuatl. Does anyone know a good website or CD, for some audio input to balance my intake of text and grammar? Best regards, and nice to find you all, Alec sg4 0ny _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at potsdam.edu Fri Sep 24 18:59:10 2010 From: schwallr at potsdam.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:59:10 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and Karttunen: http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. -- John F. Schwaller President, SUNY Potsdam 44 Pierrepont Ave. Potsdam, NY 13676 schwallr at potsdam.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Fri Sep 24 21:36:37 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:36:37 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You know, Alec, I would say you can't get any better than this in English at the beginning level. Karttunen and Campbell's books (2 volumes in the Foundation Course) will allow you to teach yourself. They are gems, and they contain lots of useful tips. Michael Quoting "John F. Schwaller" : > You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and > Karttunen: > > http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm > > For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. > > > > -- > John F. Schwaller > President, > SUNY Potsdam > 44 Pierrepont Ave. > Potsdam, NY 13676 > schwallr at potsdam.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Sat Sep 25 00:26:09 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:26:09 -0500 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Alec, We're not talking about using Lockhart's edition of Carochi. You need to get Lockhart's "Nahuatl as Written." John On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:16 PM, Alec Battles wrote: > Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not > want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native > speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have > found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to > parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. > > Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And > unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and > probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. > > As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite > hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to > exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories > being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd > characters of twitter out would be different. > > Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the > 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the > updated Carochi. > > Best, > Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From cipactonal at yahoo.com.mx Sat Sep 25 06:09:56 2010 From: cipactonal at yahoo.com.mx (Ignacio Silva) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:09:56 -0700 Subject: Coloquio para alumnos de nahuatl. Message-ID: La Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a través del Departamento de Enseñanza de Lenguas, invita a los estudiantes universitarios que actualmente aprendan o hayan aprendido lengua náhuatl a presentar ponencias para el coloquio:     Diálogos en torno a la lengua náhuatl;  perspectivas de estudio.     Objetivo: Crear un espacio de diálogo entre los estudiantes de la lengua náhuatl para reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades de estudio que se abren al aprender esta lengua, en las distintas especialidades de la UNAM y otras instituciones educativas.   Fecha de realización: lunes 11 y miércoles 13 de octubre de 2010 en las salas A y B de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. Extensión máxima de las ponencias: 10 cuartillas. Duración de las ponencias: 20 minutos.   Las ponencias deberán ser ensayos o artículos de investigación y se recibirán por correo electrónico.   La convocatoria queda abierta a partir de la publicación de la presente y se cerrará al día 01 de octubre de 2010 a las 15:00 hrs.   La aceptación de las ponencias se notificará del 04 al 06 de octubre de 2010.   Los temas a desarrollar se enfocarán en el estudio del náhuatl en los siguientes ámbitos:   a)      Educación. b)      Filosofía. c)      Literatura. d)      Historia. e)      Lingüística. f)       Política y derecho. g)      Ciencia y medicina. h)      Otras especialidades.   Recepción de ponencias e informes: Lic. Ignacio Silva Cruz. Correo electrónico: historiaviva2002 at yahoo.com.mx Pas. : Óscar Palacios Bustamante. Correo electrónico: n_opb at hotmail.com     Blog: http://nahuallahtolli.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Fri Sep 24 23:16:18 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:16:18 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: <0FB2CF78-7E61-4575-A04F-32D4A2EED0AC@me.com> Message-ID: Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd characters of twitter out would be different. Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the updated Carochi. Best, Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Fri Sep 24 19:54:17 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:54:17 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I also recommend Campbell and Karttunen's text, which I used in the class I took. Note that there do not exist any recordings of native speakers of Classical Nahuatl. There would only be recordings of modern varieties. On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:59 PM, John F. Schwaller wrote: > You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and > Karttunen: > > http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm > > For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. > > > > -- > John F. Schwaller > President, > SUNY Potsdam > 44 Pierrepont Ave. > Potsdam, NY 13676 > schwallr at potsdam.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at comcast.net Sat Sep 25 12:26:27 2010 From: karttu at comcast.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:26:27 -0400 Subject: Eighty bucks! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And > unfortunately both cost $80. Hey! This is one half of the K/C collaboration that produced the Foundation Course. I can't believe that it costs $80 to reproduce and ship our two notebooks. Have you been in touch with Fritz Schwaller? As for the paperback Nahuatl dictionary I compiled that goes with the Foundation Course, it's available from Amazon for about $32.50. It's $35 from the publisher, the U. of Oklahoma Press. (When it first came out in paperback, the price was under $20, as I recall, but in the publishing world, as elsewhere, everything creeps.) I'm going to stick to the 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the updated Carochi. Do not rely on the 1882 reprinting of Carochi. There are bunches of introduced errors. I spent months and months many years ago rooting them out. There are way too many, and they are seriously misleading, which is why I used the 1645 original as a source when compiling the Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Fran Karttunen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at comcast.net Sat Sep 25 12:38:14 2010 From: karttu at comcast.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:38:14 -0400 Subject: What actually costs $80 Message-ID: The Classical Nahuatl grammar that costs $80 is not the Campbell and Karttunen Foundation Course. It's the 2003 edition of the J. Richard Andrews grammar, a very different work. We created the Foundation Course as a jumping off point (i.e., a foundation) for people moving on to the Andrews grammar, first edition. That first edition is an important reference work but forbiddingly difficult as an entry into the language. The second edition, the one currently available, is even more unwelcoming. F. K. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at potsdam.edu Sat Sep 25 12:42:04 2010 From: schwallr at potsdam.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:42:04 -0400 Subject: Eighty bucks! In-Reply-To: <0454D311-B6D8-4400-BCD9-11C8925FDA7C@comcast.net> Message-ID: The Foundation Course costs $80 to send to Europe via air mail. The cost difference between the US and Europe is purely postage. I will double check to make certain that those shipping costs are still accurate. >> Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And >> unfortunately both cost $80. > > Hey! This is one half of the K/C collaboration that produced the > Foundation Course. I can't believe that it costs $80 to reproduce > and ship our two notebooks. Have you been in touch with Fritz Schwaller? > > As for the paperback Nahuatl dictionary I compiled that goes with the > Foundation Course, it's available from Amazon for about $32.50. It's > $35 from the publisher, the U. of Oklahoma Press. (When it first > came out in paperback, the price was under $20, as I recall, but in > the publishing world, as elsewhere, everything creeps.) > > > I'm going to stick to the > 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the > updated Carochi. > > Do not rely on the 1882 reprinting of Carochi. There are bunches of > introduced errors. I spent months and months many years ago rooting > them out. There are way too many, and they are seriously misleading, > which is why I used the 1645 original as a source when compiling the > Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. > > Fran Karttunen_______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > -- John F. Schwaller President, SUNY Potsdam 44 Pierrepont Ave. Potsdam, NY 13676 schwallr at potsdam.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Sat Sep 25 12:02:31 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:02:31 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Actually, I wasn't so keen on Nahuatl as Written because he doesn't seem to include include vowel lengths. (This is my impression based on the Amazon preview.) Years ago I went through all the trouble of learning to read and pronounce Literary Arabic in order to get a better grasp on how vowel lengths probably sounded back in the day when most languages had them. People who haven't learned how to pronounce long vowels which don't take the main accent in a word probably wouldn't care, and I understand that the length of a vowel in Classical Nahuatl is more of a scholarly reconstruction in some cases. But as far as I'm concerned, it would be a royal pain not to learn first things first. And so if I'm going to get just one first book, it would have to be one of the ones that marks vowel length: Carochi, Kartunnen, or Andrews... Alec >        We're not talking about using Lockhart's edition of Carochi. You need to get Lockhart's "Nahuatl as Written." > John > > On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:16 PM, Alec Battles wrote: > >> Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not >> want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native >> speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have >> found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to >> parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. >> >> Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And >> unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and >> probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. >> >> As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite >> hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to >> exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories >> being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd >> characters of twitter out would be different. >> >> Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the >> 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the >> updated Carochi. >> >> Best, >> Alec > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 03:31:03 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:31:03 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca Message-ID: Piyali listeros, One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. John A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From a.appleyard at btinternet.com Tue Sep 28 06:05:05 2010 From: a.appleyard at btinternet.com (ANTHONY APPLEYARD) Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:05:05 -0700 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --- On Tue, 28/9/10, John Sullivan wrote: > .... Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has demonstrated > in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. ... Probably because the macroned letters are not in the initial (zero'th) set of 256 Unicode letters and thus cause the message to be sent as one of the Unicode variants and not as plain ascii, e.g. a-macron is Unicode 0101, o-macron is  014D (hexadecimal), but plain a is 0061. Separate macron as a combining character is Unicode 035E. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 11:49:20 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:49:20 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin "b" Message-ID: Piyali listeros, The "b" is not a native sound to Nahuatl; however it is used in some loanwords. Most loanwords convert this sound to "p" or the Nahuatl "f" (which is bilabial, not involving the teeth), also not native to Nahuatl. John B. piltlahcuiloltzin. Tlen caztiah. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, totenxipal quitzacua ihyotl, quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac huan huihuitoca toquechtlan. B. letter. From Spanish. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum closes, the lips stop the airflow, which is then suddenly released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords vibrate. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Tue Sep 28 10:56:20 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:56:20 +0900 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <629509.19700.qm@web86703.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > > > .... Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has > demonstrated > > in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. ... > > Probably because the macroned letters are not in the initial (zero'th) set > of 256 Unicode letters and thus cause the message to be sent as one of the > Unicode variants and not as plain ascii, e.g. a-macron is Unicode 0101, > o-macron is 014D (hexadecimal), but plain a is 0061. Separate macron as a > combining character is Unicode 035E. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode www.stackoverflow.com would be a good place for the FAMSI webmasters to ask questions about Unicode, if they are reading this. I'm assuming the mail server they use is at least 10 years old, if not as old as the internet itself. There's bound to be a free/open-source implementation of what they use which works better, is more secure, and is actually easier to maintain. For most of the internet, Unicode is no longer an issue. There are no 'third world websites,' no thanks to Microsoft. Overbars, check marks, music notes, Egyptian heiroglyphics, and even Akkadian cuneiform if you so desire, all have their separate Wikipedia pages. Chinese-language URLs already exist, and Chinese domain names will exist soon enough. Mayan glyphs will probably not exist for several years yet, but none of these updates require the painful installation of new software on a Linux PC/server. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 11:54:07 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:54:07 -0500 Subject: vocal chords Message-ID: We'll delete that h is chords. John _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Tue Sep 28 15:23:31 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:23:31 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Some thoughts on the definition: If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to something like: /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is possible with /a/ and /o/. /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the mouth almost closed /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the mouth halfway opened I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > Piyali listeros, > One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the > letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell > participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at > the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the > definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So > here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as > the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into > the land of giberish. > John > > A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. > > A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes > and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. > > A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. > > A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes > and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 16:57:42 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:57:42 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? Probably the latter. Michael Quoting Jesse Lovegren : > Some thoughts on the definition: > > If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern > variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), > then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, > since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that > the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of > the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the > tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be > produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that > articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to > something like: > > /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open > /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded > > In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property > listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is > possible with /a/ and /o/. > /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the > mouth almost closed > /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the > mouth halfway opened > > I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. > > On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > >> Piyali listeros, >> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >> the land of giberish. >> John >> >> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >> >> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >> >> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >> >> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > > -- > Jesse Lovegren > Department of Linguistics > 645 Baldy Hall > office +1 716 645 0136 > cell +1 512 584 5468 > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 19:23:06 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:23:06 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <20100928125742.018gpb44mccook4g@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: Michael, Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. John On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the > dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual > dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to > discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? > Probably the latter. > > Michael > > Quoting Jesse Lovegren : > >> Some thoughts on the definition: >> >> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >> something like: >> >> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >> >> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >> possible with /a/ and /o/. >> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >> mouth almost closed >> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >> mouth halfway opened >> >> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >> >> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >> >>> Piyali listeros, >>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>> the land of giberish. >>> John >>> >>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>> >>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>> >>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>> >>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Jesse Lovegren >> Department of Linguistics >> 645 Baldy Hall >> office +1 716 645 0136 >> cell +1 512 584 5468 >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From campbel at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 21:48:37 2010 From: campbel at indiana.edu (Campbell, R. Joe) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:48:37 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin "b" Message-ID: Piyali John, I have two humildes sugerencias. (The trilingualness so far is as far as the multi-lingualness gets.) 1. The wording "...is then suddenly released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords vibrate." implies a sequence of events: first, that the stoppage is released, and second, that voicing begins. However, voicing begins *during* the stoppage, probably approximately simultaneously with the onset of stoppage. 2. Call me an acelli-picker if you must, but I would call those vibrating muscle tissues that provide us with "voice" 'folds', rather than 'cords'. Older usage certainly was 'cords', but phoneticians nowadays seem to have decided that 'folds' is more anatomically correct and does not give the mis-impression that they are cord-like. I can't help wondering if this comment will start a thread about genealogy. >8-) Saludos, Joe Quoting John Sullivan : > Piyali listeros, > B. piltlahcuiloltzin. Tlen caztiah. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl > tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, totenxipal quitzacua ihyotl, > quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac huan huihuitoca toquechtlan. > > B. letter. From Spanish. Represents the consonant that is heard when > the velum closes, the lips stop the airflow, which is then suddenly > released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords > vibrate. > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 22:51:19 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:51:19 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <3D62B5BC-FC1B-4F72-9F59-6F39255B6AE2@me.com> Message-ID: Quoting John Sullivan : Thanks for your note, John. > Michael, > Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl > are illiterate in their native language. But they are literate in Spanish, right? And since there is no > dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than > approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time > they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even > though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and > institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a > dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, > Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our > system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there > is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. That's a good point. Third, > the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in > the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling > system for the first time will probably want to know how that > correspondence works. All good points. I guess what you send sounded more like a course in phonology than what I expect a dictionary to tell me. But, of course, there is no limit to what a dictionary can tell us. Michael > John > > On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > >> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >> Probably the latter. >> >> Michael >> >> Quoting Jesse Lovegren : >> >>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>> >>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>> closed and the >>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>> something like: >>> >>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>> >>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>> palate and the >>> mouth almost closed >>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>> palate and the >>> mouth halfway opened >>> >>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>> >>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> >>>> Piyali listeros, >>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have >>>> to say. So >>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>> the land of giberish. >>>> John >>>> >>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Jesse Lovegren >>> Department of Linguistics >>> 645 Baldy Hall >>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 23:05:46 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:05:46 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <20100928185119.80rhbyp4w0ko8og8@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: Michael, There are no reliable stats on Mexican literacy, and much less on functional illiteracy. I remember when I was studying at the Normal School in Zacatecas over thirty years ago and the director announced that illiteracy had been eliminated in the country. There are many more native speakers of Nahuatl that are literate in Spanish than are literate in Nahuatl. That's about as good an answer as I can give you. John On Sep 28, 2010, at 5:51 PM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > Quoting John Sullivan : > > Thanks for your note, John. > >> Michael, >> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl >> are illiterate in their native language. > > But they are literate in Spanish, right? > > And since there is no >> dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than >> approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time >> they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even >> though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and >> institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a >> dictionary). > > Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, >> Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our >> system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there >> is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. > > That's a good point. > > Third, >> the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in >> the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling >> system for the first time will probably want to know how that >> correspondence works. > > All good points. I guess what you send sounded more like a course in phonology than what I expect a dictionary to tell me. But, of course, there is no limit to what a dictionary can tell us. > > Michael > > >> John >> >> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >> >>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>> Probably the latter. >>> >>> Michael >>> >>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren : >>> >>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>> >>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>>> closed and the >>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>>> something like: >>>> >>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>> >>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>> palate and the >>>> mouth almost closed >>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>> palate and the >>>> mouth halfway opened >>>> >>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>> >>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>> >>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have >>>>> to say. So >>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>> John >>>>> >>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>> Department of Linguistics >>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Wed Sep 29 03:14:19 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:14:19 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen "c" Message-ID: C1. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen quipiya nahui icaquiz. 1. Quemman quitzinpehualtia zo quitzontlamiltia tlahtolli, zo quemman quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan quitzacua ihyotl campa quinamiqui tocopac huan quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac. 2. Quemman quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin huan teipan yohui QU, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan quinechcahuia tocopac, tocamac tlapouhtoc huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan achi yamanic. 3. Quemman C2 quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan tlahuel achitzin quinechcahuia tocopac, tocamac tlapouhtoc huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan nelyamanic. 4. Quemman quitzimpehualtia pilachitencaquiliztzin huan teipan yohui E, Ē, I1 zo Ī1, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil zan eltoc iican totlancoch, totenxipal quentzin tlapohui, zozomoca ihyotl quemman pano tlatlahcotipan campa monamiqui quentzin totlancoch tlen huahcapan huan echcapan. C1. letter. Represents a consonant that has four different sounds. 1. When it begins or finalizes a word, or when it finalizes a syllable, the velum closes, the back of the tongue it touches the velum and stops the airflow, which is then released through the front of the mouth. 2. When it finalizes a syllable and is followed by QU, the velum closes, the back of the tongue approaches the velum, and the air flows suddently but softly through the middle of the open mouth. 3. When C2 finalizes a syllable, the velum closes, the back of the tongue barely approaches the velum, and the air flows suddenly and faintly through the middle of the open mouth. 4. When it begins a syllable and is followed by E, Ē, I1 or Ī1, the velum closes, the tongue is right behind the teeth, the lips open slightly, and the air hisses as it passes through the barely touching upper and lower teeth. *C2 is the third person singular specific object prefix John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From brokaw at buffalo.edu Wed Sep 29 20:24:07 2010 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:24:07 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <3D62B5BC-FC1B-4F72-9F59-6F39255B6AE2@me.com> Message-ID: Hi John, Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound represented the the letters. It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't even the main issue. If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone associated with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a dictionary. But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess that depends on what you mean by codify). In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many cases, these letters represent different sounds in different dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be appearing soon. Galen But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > Michael, > Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. > John > > On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > >> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >> Probably the latter. >> >> Michael >> >> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >> >>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>> >>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>> something like: >>> >>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>> >>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>> mouth almost closed >>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>> mouth halfway opened >>> >>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>> >>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> >>>> Piyali listeros, >>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>> the land of giberish. >>>> John >>>> >>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>> >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> Jesse Lovegren >>> Department of Linguistics >>> 645 Baldy Hall >>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Wed Sep 29 20:59:02 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:59:02 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <4CA3A067.7080000@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: Yeh Galen shut up! (I just couldn't resist, especially after your invitation.) Our dictionary is only for the Nahuatl spoken in the area of Chicontepec, Veracruz, although that is stretching the truth a bit, because those who are writing it represent only three villages in the municipality. And as you know, from village to village within a single region there are often many important differences. Some day when I have a lot of money I'll get representatives from many regions together and have them do their own dictionary. At a later point (perhaps another life) we can combine the dictionaries into one. And we'd have to make sure that everybody uses the same orthography (this perhaps may require another universe). I think there are two main reasons I want to include what sounds each letter corresponds to in different environments, and they are not very scientific. First, since all native speakers who write now think that the purpose of their writing system is to reproduce sounds, when they see our dictionary and how the words are spelled, they are going to have a lot of objections. For example, why do we write voiced and devoiced "n" with the same letter? Why do we distinguish between the the spelling of /k/ before /k/ (c), a devoiced /w/ (uh) and a word internal aspiration (h), when they sound pretty much the same? I think we need a brief explanation of these kinds of things in the work in order to ease native speakers into the orthographic system. Second, (and this is the most unscientific reason), I think most people in academia (including the majority of Mexican educational federal, state, regional and union authorities, and many bilingual teachers) think that indigenous people a! ren't smart enough, and/or that their language isn't sophisticated enough as a tool, to do high level scholarship. This may sound a bit drastic, but I believe it is a fundamental part of Western ideology. This dictionary itself is a slap in the face to this way of thinking, and its purpose will be to serve as a tool for all Nahuas who wish to re-encounter their language and begin to use it for critical and creative thinking. I don't want to pass up an opportunity to demonstrate (here, through the description of sound mechanics) that Nahuatl is just as capable as any other language of expressing complicated ideas. So much for trying to separate research and ideology. John On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Galen Brokaw wrote: > Hi John, > > Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. > Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound represented the the letters. > It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't even the main issue. > If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone asso! ciated with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a dictionary. > But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess that depends on what you mean by codify). > In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many cases, these letters represent different sounds in different dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds make! s the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be appearing soon. > > Galen > > > > > > > > > > But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? > > On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >> Michael, >> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. >> John >> >> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >> >>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>> Probably the latter. >>> >>> Michael >>> >>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >>> >>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>> >>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>>> something like: >>>> >>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>> >>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>>> mouth almost closed >>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>>> mouth halfway opened >>>> >>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>> >>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>> >>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>> John >>>>> >>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>> Department of Linguistics >>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Wed Sep 29 22:08:51 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:08:51 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting John Sullivan : > Second, (and this is the most unscientific > reason), I think most people in academia (including the majority of > Mexican educational federal, state, regional and union authorities, > and many bilingual teachers) think that indigenous people aren't > smart enough, and/or that their language isn't sophisticated enough > as a tool, to do high level scholarship. This may sound a bit > drastic, but I believe it is a fundamental part of Western ideology. > This dictionary itself is a slap in the face to this way of thinking, > and its purpose will be to serve as a tool for all Nahuas who wish to > re-encounter their language and begin to use it for critical and > creative thinking. I don't want to pass up an opportunity to > demonstrate (here, through the description of sound mechanics) that > Nahuatl is just as capable as any other language of expressing > complicated ideas. So much for trying to separate research and > ideology. > John Inin tlamantli huehueintin. Tlaxtlahui, John. Ca cualli. Michael > > On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Galen Brokaw wrote: > >> Hi John, >> >> Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The >> issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to >> pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality >> and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. >> Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and >> write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about >> the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. >> None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I >> should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this >> either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic >> description of the sound represented the the letters. >> It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than >> English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or >> even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between >> letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with >> the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess >> they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the >> dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't >> even the main issue. >> If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic >> representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define >> letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me >> that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps >> most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long >> and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact >> that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic >> representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that >> there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. >> There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds >> primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather >> than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as >> historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in >> order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given >> letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone associated >> with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an >> explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic >> environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of >> explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a >> dictionary. >> But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition >> of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence >> between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess >> that depends on what you mean by codify). >> In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), >> the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of >> the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that >> letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is >> because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many >> cases, these letters represent different sounds in different >> dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this >> dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a >> dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a >> dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is >> inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various >> vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the >> Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the >> letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which >> you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds >> makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all >> dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some >> letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases >> where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the >> various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After >> all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell >> me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be >> appearing soon. >> >> Galen >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? >> >> On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> Michael, >>> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of >>> Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is >>> no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more >>> than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every >>> time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that >>> even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and >>> institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a >>> dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography >>> (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic >>> representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more >>> than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between >>> sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants >>> correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people >>> who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will >>> probably want to know how that correspondence works. >>> John >>> >>> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >>> >>>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>>> Probably the latter. >>>> >>>> Michael >>>> >>>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >>>> >>>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>>> >>>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to >>>>> note that >>>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the >>>>> bottom of >>>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>>>> closed and the >>>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound >>>>> that must be >>>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be >>>>> simplified to >>>>> something like: >>>>> >>>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>>> >>>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a >>>>> definition as is >>>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>>> palate and the >>>>> mouth almost closed >>>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>>> palate and the >>>>> mouth halfway opened >>>>> >>>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>>> >>>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to >>>>>> present it at >>>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people >>>>>> have to say. So >>>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a >>>>>> colon, as >>>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send >>>>>> nahuat-l into >>>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>>> John >>>>>> >>>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen >>>>>> caquizti >>>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>>> >>>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>>> >>>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin >>>>>> tlen caquizti >>>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>>> >>>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the >>>>>> velum closes >>>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>>> Department of Linguistics >>>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> >>> >> >> > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Wed Sep 29 21:21:53 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:21:53 +0900 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <4CA3A067.7080000@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: > None of my > English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that > most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does > actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound > represented the the letters. Have you considered the aesthetic dimensions of the DRAE? (It's my second favorite dictionary in my library.) My favorite dictionary (in my possession I should say) is the Arabic mo'jem al-wajiz. Written at a high school level, it nonetheless manages to be quite beautiful by means of tireless definitions, using Qur'anic passages for rare/antiquated words. If something is aesthetically pleasing, then it should make a good cultural artifact. Isn't precision more in line with the European side of Mexico than with the North American side? Sorry for speaking so generally, but this is the internet after all. I would love for Nahuas to begin reading and writing their language in a literate way en masse, especially because of a book that essentially allows them to become experts in their own language. Next stop: Nahuatl video games, newspapers, and internet chat rooms! > So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular > dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you > incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for > words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it > problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? > Maybe the level of > generality with which you establish the correspondence between the > letters and the sounds makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that > they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? It's not possible. In general alphabets dilute spoken diversity, and this is the problem with written language in my opinion. Speech varies widely from place to place, but scripts do not. And even if every tribe on earth had its own script the meanings of the letters would soon be diluted by the passage of time. Hence the more widely your script is dispersed across spacetime, the less it actually relates to the way people speak. The most extreme example in this case is Chinese. Consider, however, that Chinese is also exceptional at preserving spoken diversity. Until Mandarin became the national language of China, Classical Chinese functioned much the same as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world, with the added benefit that speakers of any dialect could pronounce the script as if it were written exclusively for their dialect! For examples of this, look at the recordings of the 300 tang poems on librivox.org -- some of the more well-known ones can be found in up to 10 dialects of Chinese. These are up-to-date modern dialects pronouncing Characters that stretch back millenia in the time direction and thousands of miles in the space direction, as if the poems came from their hometown's own oral tradition. All that to say, I wish for the Nahuas sake that this were not an alphabet, but a well-researched and at least partially syllabic writing system. The reason for that is that each syllable could be pronounced slightly differently by each dialect, but retain its shape. In that case, precise phonological descritiptions would be Because the grammars and syntax of the dialects vary widely, Mandarin today functions exactly as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world. That's a bit of a fantasy, but I couldn't resist. I'm enjoying this discussion, the regular postings by John Sullivan, and I enjoy the fantasy of the Latin script playing no part in the future literacy of an ancient and distinguished tribe, as well as the Finnegans Wake-like excitement of monolingual dictionaries. If I were to go on about this stuff to my wife, I'd get very little airtime. Thank the modern savants at Google and DARPA, whose direct ancestors I count among the North American astronomers and not among Europeans. Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Thu Sep 30 01:54:08 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:54:08 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH Message-ID: CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan tocamac. CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released through the middle of the mouth. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From campbel at indiana.edu Thu Sep 30 03:39:34 2010 From: campbel at indiana.edu (Campbell, R. Joe) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:39:34 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, One detail that is missing has to do with the release of the air -- when sounds like [p t k] are released, we can say that the air is "suddenly" released, but in the case of affricates (pardon my non-phonetic characters) like [ch j tl], the space of time between the complete stoppage and the onset of the following vowel is occupied by friction, caused by the fact that the articulators remained briefly in a certain crucial proximity to each other. Or, in other words, the contact is released slowly, resulting in friction during the release period. Joe Quoting John Sullivan : > CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa > quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, > itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl > itlahcotiyan tocamac. > > CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum > closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar > ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its > sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released > through the middle of the mouth. > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Thu Sep 30 16:39:15 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:39:15 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH In-Reply-To: <20100929233934.s4udw43ri04o4ccw@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: To indulge in even more detail, I note that affricates do have a rapid release (at the front of the closure), and ALSO a delayed release (further back in the closure). Quoth Stevens (Acoustic Phonetics, 1998:412): *An affricate is produced by shaping and positioning the articulatory structure in such a way that the rapid release is produced at the anterior end of the constriction formed by the articulator. Following this release, the constriction formed immediately posterior to the point of release is maintained for a few tens of milliseconds and is then released. This constriction is much like the constriction for a fricative consonant. The sequence* *of events characterising an affricate is therefore an initial transient ocurring at the release at the anterior end of the constriction followed by a few tens of milliseconds of frication noise prior to voicing onset for the vowel.* On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Campbell, R. Joe wrote: > John, > > One detail that is missing has to do with the release of the air -- > when sounds like [p t k] are released, we can say that the air is > "suddenly" released, but in the case of affricates (pardon my > non-phonetic characters) like [ch j tl], the space of time between the > complete stoppage and the onset of the following vowel is occupied by > friction, caused by the fact that the articulators remained briefly in > a certain crucial proximity to each other. > Or, in other words, the contact is released slowly, resulting in > friction during the release period. > > Joe > > > > Quoting John Sullivan : > > > CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti > > quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa > > quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, > > itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl > > itlahcotiyan tocamac. > > > > CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum > > closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar > > ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its > > sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released > > through the middle of the mouth. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From david_becraft at hotmail.com Wed Sep 1 03:10:49 2010 From: david_becraft at hotmail.com (pancho Becraft) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:10:49 -0700 Subject: Nahuatl/etc on official notices? In-Reply-To: <246F8F45-5B36-42EB-AB65-C2B4FE42F8A8@comcast.net> Message-ID: I think there are Mexicanero and Tepehua signs in Mezquital county of Southern Durango (San Pedro Jicora?) Pancho From: karttu at comcast.net Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:34:53 -0400 To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Nahuatl/etc on official notices? There has been a project to do this in Milpa Alta. Have a look at this site: sites.google.com/site/milpaalta/home The contact person is Silverio Jim?nez Audiffred (teztla at gmail.com) Fran On Aug 29, 2010, at 6:34 PM, ANTHONY APPLEYARD wrote: In Mexico, are there any areas where direction signs and public notices and suchlike are duplicated in Nahuatl or some other local indigenous language? I have seen many such signs and notices in Wales duplicated in Welsh. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From tom_grigsby at yahoo.com Wed Sep 1 02:48:08 2010 From: tom_grigsby at yahoo.com (grigsby tom) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:48:08 -0700 Subject: atzontzompantla (sic) Message-ID: Estimados listeros, ?? I sent an email to one of my friends in the village regarding Atzontzompantla? (sic!) and got the following response: ?? Segun Don M y Do?a Al, que son los que pude preguntar lo correcto es Atzotzonpantla. Lo demas es modismos o deformaciones de la gente popular que al no saber el idioma nahuatl pronuncian palabras de acuerdo a como lo escuchan, o se acostumbra con el tiempo a escucharlo. ? ?? Digging around on Google I found this in : ?? Cuauhtinchan Map Number 2 by Keido Yoneda publicar CIESAS 2005 p.226 ?? -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From a.appleyard at btinternet.com Wed Sep 1 16:11:29 2010 From: a.appleyard at btinternet.com (ANTHONY APPLEYARD) Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 16:11:29 +0000 Subject: Nahuatl/etc on official notices? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Again, the nearest to this that I am familiar with here in Britain is Welsh in Wales, and in many areas in Wales just about all road signs etc are in both languages, e.g. ARAF = SLOW, DIM PARCIO = NO PARKING, etc. --- On Wed, 1/9/10, pancho Becraft wrote: I?think there are Mexicanero and Tepehua signs in Mezquital county of?Southern Durango (San Pedro Jicora?) Pancho -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Thu Sep 2 18:20:34 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 13:20:34 -0500 Subject: a big favor Message-ID: Listeros, I have a problem. At IDIEZ we are developing a text (vs morphology) based textbook for learning Classical Nahuatl, in which the orthography of the readings will be standardized to the Andrews-Karttunen-Campbell system. I have most of the works I need, but I seem to have misplaced Cline?s "Book of Tributes". I?m going to re-acquire it in October when I?m in the US, but I really need some of the material now for curriculum development. If anyone has the work and wouldn?t mind scanning about 5 pages of the Nahuatl and sending it to me, I would really appreciate it! On another note, yesterday we hit 7000 headwords in our monolingual dictionary. John John Sullivan, Ph.D. Professor of Nahua language and culture Universidad Aut?noma de Zacatecas Zacatecas Institute of Teaching and Research in Ethnology Tacuba 152, int. 43 Centro Hist?rico Zacatecas, Zac. 98000 Mexico Work: +52 (492) 925-3415 Fax: +1 (858) 724-3030 (U.S.A.) Home: +52 (492) 768-6048 Mobile: +52 1 (492) 103-0195 idiez at me.com www.macehualli.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Tue Sep 21 23:59:15 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2010 08:59:15 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings Message-ID: Hiya. I'm a fairly accomplished self-taught linguist. I've managed to teach myself three world languages by travelling, reading, and studying grammar. For my next language, I want to study Classical Nahuatl. From reading reviews of various books I have pretty much settled on Nahuatl as Written. If anyone has another recommendation, I'd be pleased to hear it. I am also very keen to find some recordings. Any duration or subject matter will do. A recording of an important text being read aloud would be ideal, but I am willing to settle for recordings of which there is no written correlative. I am not interested in recordings that are meant explicitly to teach you something, ie ones that go over common phrases or points of grammar, but I would be interested in any others (stories) and they wouldn't need to be Classical Nahuatl. Does anyone know a good website or CD, for some audio input to balance my intake of text and grammar? Best regards, and nice to find you all, Alec sg4 0ny _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at potsdam.edu Fri Sep 24 18:59:10 2010 From: schwallr at potsdam.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:59:10 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and Karttunen: http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. -- John F. Schwaller President, SUNY Potsdam 44 Pierrepont Ave. Potsdam, NY 13676 schwallr at potsdam.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Fri Sep 24 21:36:37 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:36:37 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You know, Alec, I would say you can't get any better than this in English at the beginning level. Karttunen and Campbell's books (2 volumes in the Foundation Course) will allow you to teach yourself. They are gems, and they contain lots of useful tips. Michael Quoting "John F. Schwaller" : > You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and > Karttunen: > > http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm > > For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. > > > > -- > John F. Schwaller > President, > SUNY Potsdam > 44 Pierrepont Ave. > Potsdam, NY 13676 > schwallr at potsdam.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Sat Sep 25 00:26:09 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:26:09 -0500 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Alec, We're not talking about using Lockhart's edition of Carochi. You need to get Lockhart's "Nahuatl as Written." John On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:16 PM, Alec Battles wrote: > Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not > want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native > speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have > found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to > parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. > > Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And > unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and > probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. > > As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite > hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to > exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories > being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd > characters of twitter out would be different. > > Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the > 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the > updated Carochi. > > Best, > Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From cipactonal at yahoo.com.mx Sat Sep 25 06:09:56 2010 From: cipactonal at yahoo.com.mx (Ignacio Silva) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:09:56 -0700 Subject: Coloquio para alumnos de nahuatl. Message-ID: La Facultad de Filosof?a y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Aut?noma de M?xico, a trav?s del Departamento de Ense?anza de Lenguas, invita a los estudiantes universitarios que actualmente aprendan o hayan aprendido lengua n?huatl a presentar ponencias para el coloquio: ? ? Di?logos en torno a la lengua n?huatl; ?perspectivas de estudio. ? ? Objetivo: Crear un espacio de di?logo entre los estudiantes de la lengua n?huatl para reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades de estudio que se abren al aprender esta lengua, en las distintas especialidades de la UNAM y otras instituciones educativas. ? Fecha de realizaci?n: lunes 11 y mi?rcoles 13 de octubre de 2010 en las salas A y B de la Facultad de Filosof?a y Letras, UNAM. Extensi?n m?xima de las ponencias: 10 cuartillas. Duraci?n de las ponencias: 20 minutos. ? Las ponencias deber?n ser ensayos o art?culos de investigaci?n y se recibir?n por correo electr?nico. ? La convocatoria queda abierta a partir de la publicaci?n de la presente y se cerrar? al d?a 01 de octubre de 2010 a las 15:00 hrs. ? La aceptaci?n de las ponencias se notificar? del 04 al 06 de octubre de 2010. ? Los temas a desarrollar se enfocar?n en el estudio del n?huatl en los siguientes ?mbitos: ? a)????? Educaci?n. b)????? Filosof?a. c)????? Literatura. d)????? Historia. e)????? Ling??stica. f)?????? Pol?tica y derecho. g)????? Ciencia y medicina. h)????? Otras especialidades. ? Recepci?n de ponencias e informes: Lic. Ignacio Silva Cruz. Correo electr?nico: historiaviva2002 at yahoo.com.mx Pas. : ?scar Palacios Bustamante. Correo electr?nico: n_opb at hotmail.com ? ? Blog: http://nahuallahtolli.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Fri Sep 24 23:16:18 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:16:18 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: <0FB2CF78-7E61-4575-A04F-32D4A2EED0AC@me.com> Message-ID: Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd characters of twitter out would be different. Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the updated Carochi. Best, Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Fri Sep 24 19:54:17 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:54:17 -0400 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I also recommend Campbell and Karttunen's text, which I used in the class I took. Note that there do not exist any recordings of native speakers of Classical Nahuatl. There would only be recordings of modern varieties. On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:59 PM, John F. Schwaller wrote: > You should also look at The Foundation Course in Nahuatl by Campbell and > Karttunen: > > http://www2.potsdam.edu/schwaljf/Nahuatl/hotlinks.htm > > For audio materials check out John Sullivan's students on You Tube. > > > > -- > John F. Schwaller > President, > SUNY Potsdam > 44 Pierrepont Ave. > Potsdam, NY 13676 > schwallr at potsdam.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at comcast.net Sat Sep 25 12:26:27 2010 From: karttu at comcast.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:26:27 -0400 Subject: Eighty bucks! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And > unfortunately both cost $80. Hey! This is one half of the K/C collaboration that produced the Foundation Course. I can't believe that it costs $80 to reproduce and ship our two notebooks. Have you been in touch with Fritz Schwaller? As for the paperback Nahuatl dictionary I compiled that goes with the Foundation Course, it's available from Amazon for about $32.50. It's $35 from the publisher, the U. of Oklahoma Press. (When it first came out in paperback, the price was under $20, as I recall, but in the publishing world, as elsewhere, everything creeps.) I'm going to stick to the 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the updated Carochi. Do not rely on the 1882 reprinting of Carochi. There are bunches of introduced errors. I spent months and months many years ago rooting them out. There are way too many, and they are seriously misleading, which is why I used the 1645 original as a source when compiling the Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Fran Karttunen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From karttu at comcast.net Sat Sep 25 12:38:14 2010 From: karttu at comcast.net (Frances Karttunen) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:38:14 -0400 Subject: What actually costs $80 Message-ID: The Classical Nahuatl grammar that costs $80 is not the Campbell and Karttunen Foundation Course. It's the 2003 edition of the J. Richard Andrews grammar, a very different work. We created the Foundation Course as a jumping off point (i.e., a foundation) for people moving on to the Andrews grammar, first edition. That first edition is an important reference work but forbiddingly difficult as an entry into the language. The second edition, the one currently available, is even more unwelcoming. F. K. _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From schwallr at potsdam.edu Sat Sep 25 12:42:04 2010 From: schwallr at potsdam.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:42:04 -0400 Subject: Eighty bucks! In-Reply-To: <0454D311-B6D8-4400-BCD9-11C8925FDA7C@comcast.net> Message-ID: The Foundation Course costs $80 to send to Europe via air mail. The cost difference between the US and Europe is purely postage. I will double check to make certain that those shipping costs are still accurate. >> Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And >> unfortunately both cost $80. > > Hey! This is one half of the K/C collaboration that produced the > Foundation Course. I can't believe that it costs $80 to reproduce > and ship our two notebooks. Have you been in touch with Fritz Schwaller? > > As for the paperback Nahuatl dictionary I compiled that goes with the > Foundation Course, it's available from Amazon for about $32.50. It's > $35 from the publisher, the U. of Oklahoma Press. (When it first > came out in paperback, the price was under $20, as I recall, but in > the publishing world, as elsewhere, everything creeps.) > > > I'm going to stick to the > 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the > updated Carochi. > > Do not rely on the 1882 reprinting of Carochi. There are bunches of > introduced errors. I spent months and months many years ago rooting > them out. There are way too many, and they are seriously misleading, > which is why I used the 1645 original as a source when compiling the > Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. > > Fran Karttunen_______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > -- John F. Schwaller President, SUNY Potsdam 44 Pierrepont Ave. Potsdam, NY 13676 schwallr at potsdam.edu _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Sat Sep 25 12:02:31 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:02:31 +0900 Subject: Looking for my first Nahuatl recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Actually, I wasn't so keen on Nahuatl as Written because he doesn't seem to include include vowel lengths. (This is my impression based on the Amazon preview.) Years ago I went through all the trouble of learning to read and pronounce Literary Arabic in order to get a better grasp on how vowel lengths probably sounded back in the day when most languages had them. People who haven't learned how to pronounce long vowels which don't take the main accent in a word probably wouldn't care, and I understand that the length of a vowel in Classical Nahuatl is more of a scholarly reconstruction in some cases. But as far as I'm concerned, it would be a royal pain not to learn first things first. And so if I'm going to get just one first book, it would have to be one of the ones that marks vowel length: Carochi, Kartunnen, or Andrews... Alec > ? ? ? ?We're not talking about using Lockhart's edition of Carochi. You need to get Lockhart's "Nahuatl as Written." > John > > On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:16 PM, Alec Battles wrote: > >> Thank everyone for their wonderful recommendations. Jesse, I would not >> want to hear recordings of a dead language by its (un?)dead native >> speakers. Imagine hearing Plato speak. *bleaugh* Nevertheless, I have >> found my year and a half among Modern Greek speakers helped me to >> parse text in Greek. What are languages if they are not spoken. >> >> Karttunen seems just as methodical as Carochi himself. And >> unfortunately both cost $80. I'll toss a coin up in the air and >> probably end up buying the opposite book anyway. >> >> As far as recordings go, I think most teachers would find me quite >> hard to please. I have always learned languages without listening to >> exercises being read aloud. I prefer texts being read aloud, stories >> being told, conversations being had. Someone reading their 150-odd >> characters of twitter out would be different. >> >> Thanks again for all of the info, everyone. I'm going to stick to the >> 1882 Carochi until I've got enough money to buy either the K&C or the >> updated Carochi. >> >> Best, >> Alec > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 03:31:03 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:31:03 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca Message-ID: Piyali listeros, One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. John A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From a.appleyard at btinternet.com Tue Sep 28 06:05:05 2010 From: a.appleyard at btinternet.com (ANTHONY APPLEYARD) Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:05:05 -0700 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --- On Tue, 28/9/10, John Sullivan wrote: > .... Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has demonstrated > in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. ... Probably because the macroned letters are not in the initial (zero'th) set of 256 Unicode letters and thus cause the message to be sent as one of the Unicode variants and not as plain ascii, e.g. a-macron is Unicode 0101, o-macron is? 014D (hexadecimal), but plain a is 0061. Separate macron as a combining character is Unicode 035E. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 11:49:20 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:49:20 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin "b" Message-ID: Piyali listeros, The "b" is not a native sound to Nahuatl; however it is used in some loanwords. Most loanwords convert this sound to "p" or the Nahuatl "f" (which is bilabial, not involving the teeth), also not native to Nahuatl. John B. piltlahcuiloltzin. Tlen caztiah. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, totenxipal quitzacua ihyotl, quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac huan huihuitoca toquechtlan. B. letter. From Spanish. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum closes, the lips stop the airflow, which is then suddenly released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords vibrate. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Tue Sep 28 10:56:20 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:56:20 +0900 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <629509.19700.qm@web86703.mail.ird.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > > > .... Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as the macron has > demonstrated > > in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into the land of giberish. ... > > Probably because the macroned letters are not in the initial (zero'th) set > of 256 Unicode letters and thus cause the message to be sent as one of the > Unicode variants and not as plain ascii, e.g. a-macron is Unicode 0101, > o-macron is 014D (hexadecimal), but plain a is 0061. Separate macron as a > combining character is Unicode 035E. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode www.stackoverflow.com would be a good place for the FAMSI webmasters to ask questions about Unicode, if they are reading this. I'm assuming the mail server they use is at least 10 years old, if not as old as the internet itself. There's bound to be a free/open-source implementation of what they use which works better, is more secure, and is actually easier to maintain. For most of the internet, Unicode is no longer an issue. There are no 'third world websites,' no thanks to Microsoft. Overbars, check marks, music notes, Egyptian heiroglyphics, and even Akkadian cuneiform if you so desire, all have their separate Wikipedia pages. Chinese-language URLs already exist, and Chinese domain names will exist soon enough. Mayan glyphs will probably not exist for several years yet, but none of these updates require the painful installation of new software on a Linux PC/server. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 11:54:07 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:54:07 -0500 Subject: vocal chords Message-ID: We'll delete that h is chords. John _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Tue Sep 28 15:23:31 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:23:31 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Some thoughts on the definition: If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to something like: /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is possible with /a/ and /o/. /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the mouth almost closed /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the mouth halfway opened I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > Piyali listeros, > One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the > letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell > participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at > the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the > definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So > here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as > the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into > the land of giberish. > John > > A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. > > A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes > and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. > > A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. > > A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes > and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 16:57:42 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:57:42 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? Probably the latter. Michael Quoting Jesse Lovegren : > Some thoughts on the definition: > > If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern > variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), > then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, > since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that > the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of > the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the > tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be > produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that > articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to > something like: > > /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open > /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded > > In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property > listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is > possible with /a/ and /o/. > /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the > mouth almost closed > /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the > mouth halfway opened > > I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. > > On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > >> Piyali listeros, >> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >> the land of giberish. >> John >> >> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >> >> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >> >> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >> >> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > > -- > Jesse Lovegren > Department of Linguistics > 645 Baldy Hall > office +1 716 645 0136 > cell +1 512 584 5468 > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 19:23:06 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:23:06 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <20100928125742.018gpb44mccook4g@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: Michael, Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. John On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the > dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual > dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to > discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? > Probably the latter. > > Michael > > Quoting Jesse Lovegren : > >> Some thoughts on the definition: >> >> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >> something like: >> >> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >> >> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >> possible with /a/ and /o/. >> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >> mouth almost closed >> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >> mouth halfway opened >> >> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >> >> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >> >>> Piyali listeros, >>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>> the land of giberish. >>> John >>> >>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>> >>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>> >>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>> >>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Jesse Lovegren >> Department of Linguistics >> 645 Baldy Hall >> office +1 716 645 0136 >> cell +1 512 584 5468 >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From campbel at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 21:48:37 2010 From: campbel at indiana.edu (Campbell, R. Joe) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:48:37 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin "b" Message-ID: Piyali John, I have two humildes sugerencias. (The trilingualness so far is as far as the multi-lingualness gets.) 1. The wording "...is then suddenly released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords vibrate." implies a sequence of events: first, that the stoppage is released, and second, that voicing begins. However, voicing begins *during* the stoppage, probably approximately simultaneously with the onset of stoppage. 2. Call me an acelli-picker if you must, but I would call those vibrating muscle tissues that provide us with "voice" 'folds', rather than 'cords'. Older usage certainly was 'cords', but phoneticians nowadays seem to have decided that 'folds' is more anatomically correct and does not give the mis-impression that they are cord-like. I can't help wondering if this comment will start a thread about genealogy. >8-) Saludos, Joe Quoting John Sullivan : > Piyali listeros, > B. piltlahcuiloltzin. Tlen caztiah. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl > tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, totenxipal quitzacua ihyotl, > quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac huan huihuitoca toquechtlan. > > B. letter. From Spanish. Represents the consonant that is heard when > the velum closes, the lips stop the airflow, which is then suddenly > released through the middle of the mouth, and the vocal chords > vibrate. > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Sep 28 22:51:19 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:51:19 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <3D62B5BC-FC1B-4F72-9F59-6F39255B6AE2@me.com> Message-ID: Quoting John Sullivan : Thanks for your note, John. > Michael, > Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl > are illiterate in their native language. But they are literate in Spanish, right? And since there is no > dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than > approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time > they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even > though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and > institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a > dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, > Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our > system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there > is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. That's a good point. Third, > the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in > the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling > system for the first time will probably want to know how that > correspondence works. All good points. I guess what you send sounded more like a course in phonology than what I expect a dictionary to tell me. But, of course, there is no limit to what a dictionary can tell us. Michael > John > > On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > >> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >> Probably the latter. >> >> Michael >> >> Quoting Jesse Lovegren : >> >>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>> >>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>> closed and the >>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>> something like: >>> >>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>> >>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>> palate and the >>> mouth almost closed >>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>> palate and the >>> mouth halfway opened >>> >>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>> >>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> >>>> Piyali listeros, >>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have >>>> to say. So >>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>> the land of giberish. >>>> John >>>> >>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Jesse Lovegren >>> Department of Linguistics >>> 645 Baldy Hall >>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Tue Sep 28 23:05:46 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:05:46 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <20100928185119.80rhbyp4w0ko8og8@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: Michael, There are no reliable stats on Mexican literacy, and much less on functional illiteracy. I remember when I was studying at the Normal School in Zacatecas over thirty years ago and the director announced that illiteracy had been eliminated in the country. There are many more native speakers of Nahuatl that are literate in Spanish than are literate in Nahuatl. That's about as good an answer as I can give you. John On Sep 28, 2010, at 5:51 PM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > Quoting John Sullivan : > > Thanks for your note, John. > >> Michael, >> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl >> are illiterate in their native language. > > But they are literate in Spanish, right? > > And since there is no >> dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than >> approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time >> they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even >> though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and >> institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a >> dictionary). > > Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, >> Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our >> system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there >> is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. > > That's a good point. > > Third, >> the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in >> the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling >> system for the first time will probably want to know how that >> correspondence works. > > All good points. I guess what you send sounded more like a course in phonology than what I expect a dictionary to tell me. But, of course, there is no limit to what a dictionary can tell us. > > Michael > > >> John >> >> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >> >>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>> Probably the latter. >>> >>> Michael >>> >>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren : >>> >>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>> >>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>>> closed and the >>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>>> something like: >>>> >>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>> >>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>> palate and the >>>> mouth almost closed >>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>> palate and the >>>> mouth halfway opened >>>> >>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>> >>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>> >>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have >>>>> to say. So >>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>> John >>>>> >>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>> Department of Linguistics >>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Wed Sep 29 03:14:19 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:14:19 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen "c" Message-ID: C1. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen quipiya nahui icaquiz. 1. Quemman quitzinpehualtia zo quitzontlamiltia tlahtolli, zo quemman quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan quitzacua ihyotl campa quinamiqui tocopac huan quiztihuetzi itlahcotiyan tocamac. 2. Quemman quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin huan teipan yohui QU, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan quinechcahuia tocopac, tocamac tlapouhtoc huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan achi yamanic. 3. Quemman C2 quitzontlamiltia pilachitencaquiliztzin motzacua tocopac, tonenepil itzintlan tlahuel achitzin quinechcahuia tocopac, tocamac tlapouhtoc huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan nelyamanic. 4. Quemman quitzimpehualtia pilachitencaquiliztzin huan teipan yohui E, ?, I1 zo ?1, motzacua tocopac, tonenepil zan eltoc iican totlancoch, totenxipal quentzin tlapohui, zozomoca ihyotl quemman pano tlatlahcotipan campa monamiqui quentzin totlancoch tlen huahcapan huan echcapan. C1. letter. Represents a consonant that has four different sounds. 1. When it begins or finalizes a word, or when it finalizes a syllable, the velum closes, the back of the tongue it touches the velum and stops the airflow, which is then released through the front of the mouth. 2. When it finalizes a syllable and is followed by QU, the velum closes, the back of the tongue approaches the velum, and the air flows suddently but softly through the middle of the open mouth. 3. When C2 finalizes a syllable, the velum closes, the back of the tongue barely approaches the velum, and the air flows suddenly and faintly through the middle of the open mouth. 4. When it begins a syllable and is followed by E, ?, I1 or ?1, the velum closes, the tongue is right behind the teeth, the lips open slightly, and the air hisses as it passes through the barely touching upper and lower teeth. *C2 is the third person singular specific object prefix John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From brokaw at buffalo.edu Wed Sep 29 20:24:07 2010 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:24:07 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <3D62B5BC-FC1B-4F72-9F59-6F39255B6AE2@me.com> Message-ID: Hi John, Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound represented the the letters. It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't even the main issue. If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone associated with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a dictionary. But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess that depends on what you mean by codify). In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many cases, these letters represent different sounds in different dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be appearing soon. Galen But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: > Michael, > Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. > John > > On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: > >> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >> Probably the latter. >> >> Michael >> >> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >> >>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>> >>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>> something like: >>> >>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>> >>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>> mouth almost closed >>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>> mouth halfway opened >>> >>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>> >>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> >>>> Piyali listeros, >>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>> the land of giberish. >>>> John >>>> >>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>> >>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>> >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> Jesse Lovegren >>> Department of Linguistics >>> 645 Baldy Hall >>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Wed Sep 29 20:59:02 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:59:02 -0500 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <4CA3A067.7080000@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: Yeh Galen shut up! (I just couldn't resist, especially after your invitation.) Our dictionary is only for the Nahuatl spoken in the area of Chicontepec, Veracruz, although that is stretching the truth a bit, because those who are writing it represent only three villages in the municipality. And as you know, from village to village within a single region there are often many important differences. Some day when I have a lot of money I'll get representatives from many regions together and have them do their own dictionary. At a later point (perhaps another life) we can combine the dictionaries into one. And we'd have to make sure that everybody uses the same orthography (this perhaps may require another universe). I think there are two main reasons I want to include what sounds each letter corresponds to in different environments, and they are not very scientific. First, since all native speakers who write now think that the purpose of their writing system is to reproduce sounds, when they see our dictionary and how the words are spelled, they are going to have a lot of objections. For example, why do we write voiced and devoiced "n" with the same letter? Why do we distinguish between the the spelling of /k/ before /k/ (c), a devoiced /w/ (uh) and a word internal aspiration (h), when they sound pretty much the same? I think we need a brief explanation of these kinds of things in the work in order to ease native speakers into the orthographic system. Second, (and this is the most unscientific reason), I think most people in academia (including the majority of Mexican educational federal, state, regional and union authorities, and many bilingual teachers) think that indigenous people a! ren't smart enough, and/or that their language isn't sophisticated enough as a tool, to do high level scholarship. This may sound a bit drastic, but I believe it is a fundamental part of Western ideology. This dictionary itself is a slap in the face to this way of thinking, and its purpose will be to serve as a tool for all Nahuas who wish to re-encounter their language and begin to use it for critical and creative thinking. I don't want to pass up an opportunity to demonstrate (here, through the description of sound mechanics) that Nahuatl is just as capable as any other language of expressing complicated ideas. So much for trying to separate research and ideology. John On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Galen Brokaw wrote: > Hi John, > > Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. > Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound represented the the letters. > It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't even the main issue. > If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone asso! ciated with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a dictionary. > But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess that depends on what you mean by codify). > In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many cases, these letters represent different sounds in different dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds make! s the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be appearing soon. > > Galen > > > > > > > > > > But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? > > On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >> Michael, >> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works. >> John >> >> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >> >>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>> Probably the latter. >>> >>> Michael >>> >>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >>> >>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>> >>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to note that >>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of >>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the >>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound that must be >>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to >>>> something like: >>>> >>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>> >>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is >>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>>> mouth almost closed >>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the >>>> mouth halfway opened >>>> >>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>> >>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>> >>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at >>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So >>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as >>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into >>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>> John >>>>> >>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti >>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>> >>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>> Department of Linguistics >>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> _______________________________________________ >> Nahuatl mailing list >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >> >> > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Wed Sep 29 22:08:51 2010 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:08:51 -0400 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting John Sullivan : > Second, (and this is the most unscientific > reason), I think most people in academia (including the majority of > Mexican educational federal, state, regional and union authorities, > and many bilingual teachers) think that indigenous people aren't > smart enough, and/or that their language isn't sophisticated enough > as a tool, to do high level scholarship. This may sound a bit > drastic, but I believe it is a fundamental part of Western ideology. > This dictionary itself is a slap in the face to this way of thinking, > and its purpose will be to serve as a tool for all Nahuas who wish to > re-encounter their language and begin to use it for critical and > creative thinking. I don't want to pass up an opportunity to > demonstrate (here, through the description of sound mechanics) that > Nahuatl is just as capable as any other language of expressing > complicated ideas. So much for trying to separate research and > ideology. > John Inin tlamantli huehueintin. Tlaxtlahui, John. Ca cualli. Michael > > On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Galen Brokaw wrote: > >> Hi John, >> >> Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The >> issue for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to >> pronounce sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality >> and utility of doing this effectively in any dictionary. >> Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and >> write in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about >> the correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. >> None of my English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I >> should say that most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this >> either, the DRAE does actually include an attempt to give a phonetic >> description of the sound represented the the letters. >> It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than >> English. But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or >> even a very accurate way to learn about the relationship between >> letters and sounds. Most people probably won't even be familiar with >> the terms used to refer to the articulatory organs (although I guess >> they could refer to the entries for unknown anatomical terms in the >> dictionary, hopefully with a visual illustration). But that isn't >> even the main issue. >> If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic >> representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define >> letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me >> that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps >> most?) cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long >> and complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact >> that you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic >> representation doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that >> there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. >> There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds >> primarily because alphabetic systems are largely phonemic rather >> than phonetic (although there are other reasons as well such as >> historical processes that create alphabetic redundancies). So in >> order to really define the sounds that are represented by any given >> letter, in addition to the "base" or "standard" allophone associated >> with a particular letter, wouldn't you also have to include an >> explanation of all of the other allophones and the linguistic >> environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this kind of >> explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a >> dictionary. >> But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition >> of a letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence >> between a sound (or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess >> that depends on what you mean by codify). >> In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), >> the letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of >> the alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that >> letter. I think the reason they define the letters in this way is >> because, in addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many >> cases, these letters represent different sounds in different >> dialects. If I understand your project correctly, you want this >> dictionary to be a standard reference that would function like a >> dictionary of any other language. So unless this is going to be a >> dictionary of a particular dialect (which one might argue is >> inevitable with Nahuatl unless you incorporate all the various >> vocabulary and differing definitions for words in use by all of the >> Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it problematic to define the >> letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of generality with which >> you establish the correspondence between the letters and the sounds >> makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that they apply to all >> dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for some >> letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In cases >> where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for the >> various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After >> all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell >> me to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be >> appearing soon. >> >> Galen >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary? >> >> On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>> Michael, >>> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of >>> Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is >>> no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more >>> than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every >>> time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that >>> even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and >>> institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a >>> dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography >>> (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic >>> representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more >>> than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between >>> sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants >>> correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people >>> who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will >>> probably want to know how that correspondence works. >>> John >>> >>> On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote: >>> >>>> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the >>>> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual >>>> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to >>>> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? >>>> Probably the latter. >>>> >>>> Michael >>>> >>>> Quoting Jesse Lovegren: >>>> >>>>> Some thoughts on the definition: >>>>> >>>>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern >>>>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl), >>>>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed, >>>>> since there are only oral vowels. Also it might be preferable to >>>>> note that >>>>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the >>>>> bottom of >>>>> the mouth. /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum >>>>> closed and the >>>>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But /a/ is the only sound >>>>> that must be >>>>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up. So I think that >>>>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be >>>>> simplified to >>>>> something like: >>>>> >>>>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open >>>>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded >>>>> >>>>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property >>>>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a >>>>> definition as is >>>>> possible with /a/ and /o/. >>>>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>>> palate and the >>>>> mouth almost closed >>>>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the >>>>> palate and the >>>>> mouth halfway opened >>>>> >>>>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality. >>>>> >>>>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Piyali listeros, >>>>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the >>>>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell >>>>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to >>>>>> present it at >>>>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the >>>>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people >>>>>> have to say. So >>>>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a >>>>>> colon, as >>>>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send >>>>>> nahuat-l into >>>>>> the land of giberish. >>>>>> John >>>>>> >>>>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen >>>>>> caquizti >>>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>>> >>>>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes >>>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>>> >>>>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin >>>>>> tlen caquizti >>>>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan. >>>>>> >>>>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the >>>>>> velum closes >>>>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth. >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> Jesse Lovegren >>>>> Department of Linguistics >>>>> 645 Baldy Hall >>>>> office +1 716 645 0136 >>>>> cell +1 512 584 5468 >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Nahuatl mailing list >>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Nahuatl mailing list >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl >>> >>> >> >> > > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From alec.battles at gmail.com Wed Sep 29 21:21:53 2010 From: alec.battles at gmail.com (Alec Battles) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:21:53 +0900 Subject: Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca In-Reply-To: <4CA3A067.7080000@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: > None of my > English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that > most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does > actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound > represented the the letters. Have you considered the aesthetic dimensions of the DRAE? (It's my second favorite dictionary in my library.) My favorite dictionary (in my possession I should say) is the Arabic mo'jem al-wajiz. Written at a high school level, it nonetheless manages to be quite beautiful by means of tireless definitions, using Qur'anic passages for rare/antiquated words. If something is aesthetically pleasing, then it should make a good cultural artifact. Isn't precision more in line with the European side of Mexico than with the North American side? Sorry for speaking so generally, but this is the internet after all. I would love for Nahuas to begin reading and writing their language in a literate way en masse, especially because of a book that essentially allows them to become experts in their own language. Next stop: Nahuatl video games, newspapers, and internet chat rooms! > So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular > dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you > incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for > words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it > problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? > Maybe the level of > generality with which you establish the correspondence between the > letters and the sounds makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that > they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? It's not possible. In general alphabets dilute spoken diversity, and this is the problem with written language in my opinion. Speech varies widely from place to place, but scripts do not. And even if every tribe on earth had its own script the meanings of the letters would soon be diluted by the passage of time. Hence the more widely your script is dispersed across spacetime, the less it actually relates to the way people speak. The most extreme example in this case is Chinese. Consider, however, that Chinese is also exceptional at preserving spoken diversity. Until Mandarin became the national language of China, Classical Chinese functioned much the same as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world, with the added benefit that speakers of any dialect could pronounce the script as if it were written exclusively for their dialect! For examples of this, look at the recordings of the 300 tang poems on librivox.org -- some of the more well-known ones can be found in up to 10 dialects of Chinese. These are up-to-date modern dialects pronouncing Characters that stretch back millenia in the time direction and thousands of miles in the space direction, as if the poems came from their hometown's own oral tradition. All that to say, I wish for the Nahuas sake that this were not an alphabet, but a well-researched and at least partially syllabic writing system. The reason for that is that each syllable could be pronounced slightly differently by each dialect, but retain its shape. In that case, precise phonological descritiptions would be Because the grammars and syntax of the dialects vary widely, Mandarin today functions exactly as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world. That's a bit of a fantasy, but I couldn't resist. I'm enjoying this discussion, the regular postings by John Sullivan, and I enjoy the fantasy of the Latin script playing no part in the future literacy of an ancient and distinguished tribe, as well as the Finnegans Wake-like excitement of monolingual dictionaries. If I were to go on about this stuff to my wife, I'd get very little airtime. Thank the modern savants at Google and DARPA, whose direct ancestors I count among the North American astronomers and not among Europeans. Alec _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From idiez at me.com Thu Sep 30 01:54:08 2010 From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:54:08 -0500 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH Message-ID: CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl itlahcotiyan tocamac. CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released through the middle of the mouth. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From campbel at indiana.edu Thu Sep 30 03:39:34 2010 From: campbel at indiana.edu (Campbell, R. Joe) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:39:34 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, One detail that is missing has to do with the release of the air -- when sounds like [p t k] are released, we can say that the air is "suddenly" released, but in the case of affricates (pardon my non-phonetic characters) like [ch j tl], the space of time between the complete stoppage and the onset of the following vowel is occupied by friction, caused by the fact that the articulators remained briefly in a certain crucial proximity to each other. Or, in other words, the contact is released slowly, resulting in friction during the release period. Joe Quoting John Sullivan : > CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti > quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa > quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, > itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl > itlahcotiyan tocamac. > > CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum > closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar > ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its > sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released > through the middle of the mouth. > _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl From lovegren at buffalo.edu Thu Sep 30 16:39:15 2010 From: lovegren at buffalo.edu (Jesse Lovegren) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:39:15 -0400 Subject: piltlahcuiloltzin tlen CH In-Reply-To: <20100929233934.s4udw43ri04o4ccw@webmail.iu.edu> Message-ID: To indulge in even more detail, I note that affricates do have a rapid release (at the front of the closure), and ALSO a delayed release (further back in the closure). Quoth Stevens (Acoustic Phonetics, 1998:412): *An affricate is produced by shaping and positioning the articulatory structure in such a way that the rapid release is produced at the anterior end of the constriction formed by the articulator. Following this release, the constriction formed immediately posterior to the point of release is maintained for a few tens of milliseconds and is then released. This constriction is much like the constriction for a fricative consonant. The sequence* *of events characterising an affricate is therefore an initial transient ocurring at the release at the anterior end of the constriction followed by a few tens of milliseconds of frication noise prior to voicing onset for the vowel.* On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Campbell, R. Joe wrote: > John, > > One detail that is missing has to do with the release of the air -- > when sounds like [p t k] are released, we can say that the air is > "suddenly" released, but in the case of affricates (pardon my > non-phonetic characters) like [ch j tl], the space of time between the > complete stoppage and the onset of the following vowel is occupied by > friction, caused by the fact that the articulators remained briefly in > a certain crucial proximity to each other. > Or, in other words, the contact is released slowly, resulting in > friction during the release period. > > Joe > > > > Quoting John Sullivan : > > > CH. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentlatzacuilcayotl tlen caquizti > > quemman motzacua tocopac, tonenepilpatlauhca quitzacua ihyotl campa > > quinamiqui iican tocamatapalpamiuh, tonenepil eli quentzin comoltic, > > itehtenno quinamiqui tocamatapalpamiuh huan quiztihuetzi ihyotl > > itlahcotiyan tocamac. > > > > CH. letter. Represents the consonant that is heard when the velum > > closes, the middle of the tongue touches the back of the alveolar > > ridge and stops the airflow, the tongue becomes slightly concave, its > > sides touch the alveolar ridge, and the air is suddenly released > > through the middle of the mouth. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Nahuatl mailing list > Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org > http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl > > -- Jesse Lovegren Department of Linguistics 645 Baldy Hall office +1 716 645 0136 cell +1 512 584 5468 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Nahuatl mailing list Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl