Carochi's notation

[Frances Karttunen]

We are deeply indebted to Carochi for revealing, more than any other  
scholar of Nahuatl, the systematic phonology of the language. Without  
understanding distinctive vowel length and the function of the  
glottal stop as a segmental consonant (or--in many regional variants-- 
the reflexes of these two things), Nahuatl morphology seems arbitrary  
where it is, in fact, predictable.

The problems with Carochi's notation are the following:

1. Marking long vowels with macrons and (some) short vowels with an  
accent mark is redundant. If a vowel is not long, then it is short.  
(To my knowledge, only Estonian has a three-way vowel-length contrast  
of over-long, half-long, and short.) In Nahuatl it is sufficient to  
mark the long vowels long.

2. Marking the presence of a glottal stop with a diacritic over the  
preceding vowel misleads people into the belief that it is not a  
consonantal segment but some quality of the vowel. Granted, a vowel  
followed by a glottal stop does have a different quality from one not  
followed by a glottal stop. (Long vowels shorten, all vowels reflect  
an anticipatory constriction of the glottis.) What is more, Carochi  
uses different diacritics for word-final glottal stop and for all  
others. Again, word-final glottal stop may sound different from a  
glottal stop within a word, but that difference is entirely  
predictable. In the systematic phonology of the language, the glottal  
stop (or its reflex in variant forms of the language) is a consonant  
just as much as /p/ and /t/, so it is best written with a letter  
rather than as a diacritic.

3. The other issue that has been brought up about the writing of /k/  
as c or qu depending on context, and likewise /s/ as c/ç or z  
depending on context, is derived from Spanish orthography. An example  
of a subsequent sound change in Spanish happening without effect on  
Nahuatl orthography is the change (for Spanish but not for Nahuatl)  
of the sound represented by x.

It has been an issue of long-standing whether Nahuatl should be  
better written with k, s, and w.  To do so makes Nahuatl look "less  
Spanish," but it also renders the vast body of written Nahuatl less  
accessible to those who use the k/s/w notation. Nobody, to my  
knowledge, has proposed doing away with the digraphs tl, tz, and ch,  
so obviously the push has never been to the full realization of "one  
sound/one symbol."

I gave all this long thought when embarking on how to represent the  
canonical forms in An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, and I came  
down on the side of J. Richard Andrews. Back then, Una Canger advised  
me, "Whatever you choose will be OK, just as long as you tell people  
clearly what it is you are doing." In the introduction to the  
dictionary I did tell users what I was doing and why. But I sought to  
present information in the least misleading and the most serviceable  
form possible, and that is what I came up with, following Dick  
Andrews' example.

Frances Karttunen


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