Nahuatl Digest, Vol 309, Issue 2

Tue Sep 3 03:16:30 UTC 2013

Listeros,

I am very happy that a there is now a publishing venture aiming to produce
literature in Nahuatl for Nahuatl speakers - this is of immense value for
speakers and linguists alike. Both congratulations and thanks and thanks
are in order with to John and Justyna for starting this program and to
Refugio for his excellent work.

This notwithstanding I am highly critical of the reasoning behind the
decision to champion a single orthographic standard, which from my point of
view is both unnecessary and possibly detrimental. The reason it is
unnecessary is that Nahuatl speakers since the 16th century have been able
to communicate fine in writing without a standardized orthography (just
like Shakespeare was able to write his plays without one). I know Nahuatl
speakers who use a Carochi style writing system on facebook. And I know
Nahuatl speakers who write using only ad hoc writing systems that to me is
every bit as frustrating to read as the texts written by the least educated
scribes of the 16th century, with arbitrary word boundaries and completely
inconsistent representation of phonemes. But they get their points across
to each other just fine. The main function of standardization is and has
always been, not ease of communication, but the construction of norms, and
normalcy, and by extension the construction of difference, hierarchy and
power.

The reason I think standardization is possibly linguistically (and
socially) detrimental is because the process of standardization is
inevitably also a political process that leads to the glossing over and
eventual erasure of linguistic diversity (just a the introduction of an
English standard orthography led to a political process that marginalized
those dialects of English that became "non-standard"). Erasure both in the
sense that some linguistic differences are rendered u=invisible to future
scholars, but also in the sense that some varieties and the features their
speakers feel characterize them are rendered invisible, as some varieties
are given priority in the construction of a norm.

In the discussion of Launey's-Carochi's orthography one point is forgotten,
namely that Carochi chose to represent the glottal stop with a diacritic
because that reflected something about his understanding of Tenochca
Nahuatl phonology prosody. He did not consider the glottal stop to be a
segment, but a suprasegmental feature of a syllable - which was supported
by the fact that glottal stop and vowel length is in complementary
distribution in Nahuatl. He also chose it because he was describing a
language which did not have the phone [h], but a glottal stop.  Some
dialects have the phone [h] others have [ʔ]  - this difference is made
invisible by the choice to represent both sounds with the symbol <h>.
Nahuatl is not one thing, it is many. There are varieties in which <tl>
exists as a separate phoneme and varieties in which it doesn't, there are
varieties in which /b/ is phonemic and others in which it isn't, varieties
that distinguish vowel length others that don't, some varieties that have 6
vowels others that have five, et cetera. These differences (and perhaps
even more so the substantial morphological and syntactic differences among
varieties) are not simply unfortunate obstacles for effective communication
between speakers of different varieties, but are in fact the very
linguistic and cultural wealth that we should strive to preserve and
respect.

best wishes,
Magnus

On 2 September 2013 15:58, <nahuatl-request at lists.famsi.org> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Fw:  Totlahtol (Michael Swanton)
>    2. Re: Fw:  Totlahtol (BT Yahoo!)
>    3. Carochi's notation (Frances Karttunen)
>    4. Fw:  Fw:  Totlahtol (Michael Swanton)
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com>
> To: BT Yahoo! <a.appleyard at btinternet.com>, Nahuat-L <
> nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG>
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 08:40:02 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw: Totlahtol
> I am not sure what is inconvenient about a pair of simple, unambiguous
> writing conventions. Not only have some of the world's most widely written
> languages used such conventions without difficulty, but Nahuatl writers
> have also used them successfully for centuries. Orthographies and
> phonological representations are very different things.
>
> One would be hard pressed to find an example of a writing system in one
> language that has not been influenced by another. I think people generally
> understand and accept that writing conventions reflect history. That
> history not only includes earlier sound changes, but also contact. Today,
> English speakers write with Latin letters (and not runes, ogham or
> cuneiform) because of their history. Poles write with Latin letters instead
> of Cyrillic for a similar reason. Persian speakers today write with a
> script derived from Arabic (and not Pahlavi, cuneiform or Sanskrit), which
> they in turn passed on to Urdu. Etc.
>
> Doubtlessly such considerations of potential ambiguity and history
> informed Andrews, Campbell et al. in their pedagogic/philological
> orthography, since it makes use of these conventions. However, I am at a
> loss to explain how the "Carochi orthography", from which the proposal was
> derived, could possibly be qualified as being of little value. On the
> contrary, it has been exceedingly valuable for philological and linguistic
> investigation. Moreover, Launey's pedagogic use of it to teach the grammar
> of the old texts strikes me as quite sound, much in the tradition of the
> macron in Latin grammars or the overdot to indicate palatalization in Old
> English ones.
>
>
> I know of no variety of Nahuatl with the phone [y].
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: BT Yahoo! <a.appleyard at btinternet.com>
> To: Nahuat-L <nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG>
> Sent: Monday, September 2, 2013 12:33 AM
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw:  Totlahtol
>
>
>
>
> Michael Swanton wrote:-
> > The "Carochi orthography" was the most sophisticated orthography used
> during the colonial period.
> > We owe a great deal of our understanding of "Classical Nahuatl" to it. I
> find McCafferty's comments about it having "little value" to be utterly
> baffling.
>
> An inconvenience with Spanish-influenced classical Nahuatl spelling is
> that how to spell the sounds [k] and [s] changes if they are followed by
> [i] or [e] or [y]. That is a carry-over from phonetic changes that happened
> to the sounds [k] and [g] and [kw] in Europe in Classical Latin as it
> changed into Vulgar Latin and then into early Spanish (and Italian and
> French etc); those sound changes did not happen in Nahuatl.
>
> Citlalyani.
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
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>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: BT Yahoo! <a.appleyard at btinternet.com>
> To: Nahuat-L <nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG>
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 16:53:15 +0100 (BST)
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw: Totlahtol
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>  Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com> wrote:-
>
> > I know of no variety of Nahuatl with the phone [y].
> Sorry: I meant [j] (the sound of English "y" in "yet" and Spanish "y" in
> "yo").
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Frances Karttunen <karttu at comcast.net>
> To: nahuatl discussion list <nahuatl at lists.famsi.org>
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 13:56:53 -0400
> Subject: [Nahuat-l] Carochi's notation
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com>
> To: Nahuat-L <nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG>
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 12:52:45 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [Nahuat-l] Fw: Fw: Totlahtol
>
>
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com>
> To: Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>; Nahuat-L <
> nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG>
> Sent: Monday, September 2, 2013 2:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw:  Totlahtol
>
>
>
> Michael McCafferty,
> I believe you are conflating different issues. One’s choice of orthography
> is different from erroneous grammatical interpretations. Regardless of what
> orthography one uses, it is possible to make mistakes in grammar, etymology
> and translation. This makes your dismissal of Launey’s Introduction based
> on erroneous, but unspecified, grammatical interpretations seem gratuitous
> when addressing a question about orthography.
>
> It is also, I believe, quite mistaken. I have taught Classical Nahuatl at
> Leiden University for several years before moving to Mexico and I found the
> French version of the Introduction to be quite valuable. Una Canger has
> used the Introduction for many years in her classes in Denmark. While all
> works can be improved—there are certainly some errata that need to be noted
>  (especially in the translated versions of his book) and I have different
> interpretations of certain grammatical phenomena (particularly the
> passive)—Launey’s Introduction for me and many others continues to be the
> best, most accessible and overall reliable initiation to the language.
> [Full disclosure: I studied with Launey in Paris years ago].
>
> Returning to the issue of orthography, Launey’s pedagogic use of the
> so-called Jesuit tradition (attested in Carochi, the Bancroft MS, Aldama y
> Guevara and to some extent in Rincón and Clavijero) strikes me as quite
> sound. When beginning Latin, one carefully learns to write the macrons in
> order to learn the grammar, meter and pronunciation even though they don’t
> appear in any classical texts. Eventually then, such annotations are
> disposed of once the learner has assimilated them. The same applies when
> learning Old English where not only are macrons added, but many authors add
> an overdot to
>  <c> and <g> to indicate palatal as opposed to velar articulation. By the
> same token, when beginning Classical Hebrew, it is common to learn the
> texts with niqqud. In other words, there is a long practice—in reality
> going back to the Middle Ages—of adding diacritics to classical
> orthographies and texts to facilitate language learning. We may want to
> view Carochi’s orthography as part of this tradition.
>
> The advantage of this approach is that relevant information can be added
> to the text with minimal modification of the original. The goal then is to
> facilitate access to the original texts, not to retranscribe them. In my
> advanced level classes, we would take a text (even ones with such divergent
> orthographies as the Florentine Codex or Olmos) and directly mark long
> vowels and glottalization using Carochi’s diacritics without
> retranscribing. This made for a good exercise.
>
> Andrews’ orthography is different. It requires
>  retranscription of texts because of its innovative use of <h> to indicate
> glottalization. There is nothing wrong with that; it is just a slightly
> different approach to teaching the classical language. Indeed, there are
> some good reasons to do so (p.e. emphasizing the complementary distribution
> of Carochi’s grave and circumflex diacritics). And, even though it was not
> designed for such purposes, Andrews’ orthography would make for a fine
> practical orthography should the Nahua choose to adopt it.
>
> I do however disagree with your assertion that Andrews’s orthography
> characterizes the “modern study” of Nahuatl. Such an assertion would
> exclude many obligatory references for the language (Canger, Peralta, L.
> Campbell, Kaufman, Dakin, Lastra…). Indeed, what we see is that Andrew’s
> orthography is primarily used among certain scholars, generally American
> and generally more involved in lexicographic or philological endeavors (J.
>  Campbell, Karttunen, Wright, Sullivan, Amith, Wimmer…and I have used it
> too in one article where I was making a comparative philological argument).
> As much as I respect and admire the work of these other scholars, I am sure
> they would be among the first to acknowledge that there are many important
> modern studies of Nahuatl that do not use Andrews’ orthography. The simple
> fact is that people write Nahuatl in different ways depending on their goal
> and on their intended audience, and any serious student of Nahuatl should
> be able to shift easily from one representational system to another.
>
> It would be most unfortunate if something as trivial as the use of an <h>
> be taken as an emblem as to one’s membership “in the flow of modern study”.
>
> Regardless of orthography, any Nahuatl speaker who writes his language is
> making a contribution to bring the language into a new social space.
> Regardless of orthography, any scholar who makes
>  a good argument is contributing to Nahuatl language studies. Regardless
> of orthography, any teacher who gets his students interested in Nahuatl and
> sets them on a path to learning more is broadening the discipline and
> dignifying the profound linguistic knowledge that Nahuatl speakers, past
> and present, have.
>
> Regards,
> Michael Swanton
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
> To:
> Sent: Monday, September 2, 2013 9:59 AM
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw:  Totlahtol
>
>
>
> Carochi has served very well. No question. However, as far I as I can
> tell, only Carochi and Launey use Carochi's orthographic system. If you
> look around, that orthography is not where the modern study of the
> language is going. That's what I meant by my "utterly baffling" thought.
>
> I explained also in a letter to Mr. Guillaume that some rather
> "baffling" ideas about Nahuatl grammar are found in Launey, and I'm
> confident I didn't find all of the mistakes. In the end, I would
> recommend having a copy of Launey on your shelf, but not as the sole
> source of your Nahuatl knowledge, and certainly not as a book used in a
> classroom unless the professor is knowledgeable enough to 1) catch
> Launey's errors and 2) bring enormous amounts of material written in
> the non-Carochi orthographic system so that students can be in the flow
> of modern
>  study.
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
>
> Quoting Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com>:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Forwarded Message -----
> > From: Michael Swanton <mwswanton at yahoo.com>
> > To: Guillaume Jacques <rgyalrongskad at gmail.com>;
> > "nahuatl at lists.famsi.org" <nahuatl at lists.famsi.org>
> > Sent: Sunday, September 1, 2013 4:28 PM
> > Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Totlahtol
> >
> >
> >
> > The "Carochi orthography" was the most sophisticated orthography used
> >
>  during the colonial period. We owe a great deal of our understanding
> > of "Classical Nahuatl" to it. I find McCafferty's comments about it
> > having "little value" to be utterly baffling.
> >
> > Michael Swanton
> >
> >
> >
> > ________________________________
> > From: Guillaume Jacques <rgyalrongskad at gmail.com>
> > To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> > Sent: Sunday, September 1, 2013 2:35 PM
> > Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Totlahtol
> >
> >
> > I am not a Nahuatl scholar, but as an outsider I think that the Carochi
> > orthography (perhaps with some modifications to facilitate its
> typeability,
> > especially concerning th glottal stop) is still the best orthography to
> > represent Classical Nahuatl. I am sorry
>  to say that using an orthography
> > that neglect vowel length is doing a disservice to language learners.
> > Launey's manual is still in my opinion the best available introduction to
> > Classical Nahuatl.
> >
> >
> > Guillaume Jacques
> >
> >
> > 2013/9/1 Michael McCafferty
> > <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
> >
> >> John,
> >>
> >> I'm happy to hear about this. "Anthropological Linguistics" will soon
> >> publish my review of Michel Launey's Nahuatl grammar translated to
> English,
> >> and one of the bedeviling aspects of his work is the perpetuation of
> >> Carochi's orthography. The review was held up for a while as the editor
> >> insisted that I use Carochi's orthography in describing various aspects
> of
> >> Nahuatl, and that was difficult for me as I see little value in
>  using it.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> Michael
> >>
> >>
> >> Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:
> >>
> >>   Piyali notequixpoyohuan,
> >>>          "Totlahtol" is a Series of the University of Warsaw, IDIEZ and
> >>>
> > other
> >>> collaborating institutions, for publishing monolingual works in all
> >>> variants of Modern Nahuatl and Classical Nahuatl. Works are
> >>> standardized to the orthography of Campbell/Andrews/Karttunen. We
> >>> hope to accomplish two things with this Series: 1. Get monolingual
> >>> works of Nahuatl from all variants across space and time into the
> >>> hands of native speakers, especially young students; 2. By rigorously
> >>> standardizing the orthography of all
>  variants across space and time,
> >>> and "flooding the market" with these works, we hope to break the
> >>> eighty-year political impasse that has prevented the orthographical
> >>> standardization of Nahuatl. The first work, in the sub-series,
> >>> "Toconehuan", is a children's' book, "Malintzin itlahtol", written by
> >>> Refugio Nava of the University of Tlaxcala. The paper version is now
> >>>
> > being distributed, free of charge, in Nahua communities and in
> >>> educational institutions. You may download a free pdf copy with the
> >>> following link
> >>> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.
> **com/u/15911797/malintzin_**itlahtol.pdf<
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15911797/malintzin_itlahtol.pdf>
> >>> or go to www.macehualli.org under Publications. When you read the
> >>> book, you will not only recognize the orthography, but you will be
> >>> able to appreciate how Tlaxcallan Nahuatl has evolved over the last
> >>> 500 years. Have fun!
> >>> John
> >>>
> >>> John Sullivan, Ph.D.
> >>> Research Scholar in Nahuatl Studies and
> >>> Academic Director of the Yale-IDIEZ
> > Nahuatl Language Institute,
> >>> Yale University;
> >>> Visiting scholar, Faculty of Artes Liberales
> >>> University of Warsaw;
> >>> Professor of Nahua language and culture
> >>> Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas;
> >>> Director, Zacatecas Institute of Teaching and Research in Ethnology
> >>> Tacuba 152, int.
>  43
> >>> Centro Histórico
> >>> Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
> >>> Mexico
> >>> Work: +52 (492) 925-3415
> >>> Home: +52 (492) 768-6048
> >>> Mobile (Mexico): +52 1 (492) 103-0195
> >>> Mobile (US): (615) 649-2790
> >>> idiez at me.com
> >>> www.macehualli.org
> >>>
> >>> ______________________________**_________________
> >>> Nahuatl mailing list
> >>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> >>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/**listinfo/nahuatl<
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> ______________________________**_________________
> >> Nahuatl mailing list
> >> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> >> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/**listinfo/nahuatl<
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Guillaume Jacques
> > CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
> > http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
> > http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
> > http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
> >
>
>
>
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>

-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen
PhD. candidate
Department of Anthropology

Brown University
128 Hope St.
Providence, RI 02906

*magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu*
US: 001 401 651 8413
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