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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=563355918-03062006>Many thanks
to Joe, for jumpstarting my request, and to all who came forth with
their stories. I'm still quite the novice myself, but I'll go on the record and
say that in spite of a couple of decades of collecting source material and
superficially dabbling in Nahuatl, I finally dove in about six years ago, with
the goal of translating nahuatl glosses in Otomi codices and comparing lexical
items (calques) between Otomi and Nahuatl to try and work out the role of
language in the multiethnic and multilinguistic culture of late pre-Hispanic and
early colonial central Mexico. The Nahuat-l list, Joe and Fran's Foundation
Course notes and some tutoring by the late Cayetano Reyes García of El Colegio
de Michoacán got me off and crawling (I was going to write "running" but I
decided to be realistic). I managed to crack the glosses and analyze the
calques, which are in an appendix to my dissertation, finished last year. To
motivate myself to stick with Nahuatl, and to share the modest but useful fruits
of my efforts, I offered a seminar called "Lectura del Nahuatl" to
undergrad history students at the Universidad de Guanajuato last year and again
this year. The groups are small but motivated, and after a semester everyone can
hack out a rough translation of a few par</SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2><SPAN class=563355918-03062006>agraphs of 16th century central Mexican
Nahuatl. A big obstacle has been the lack of grammatical and lexical sources in
Spanish that incorporate the phonological advances since c 1975, so I've been
working on a basic Nahuatl grammar in Spanish, with a detailed system of
references, combining data from Campbell/Karttunen, Andrews, Lockhart, Carochi,
Rincón, Molina, Launey, and other sources. The examples are all written out
twice, first in traditional "Franciscan" orthography, then in Andrews/ Campbell/
Karttunen's "traditional-phonemic" spelling, and with the International Phonetic
Alphabet where necessary. The idea is to get the students used to both forms and
train them to move back and forth: "ahora pongamos nuestros lentes de rayos x
para ver las vocales largas y los saltillos". I'm still working the bugs out of
the text and adding examples from colonial sources.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN
class=563355918-03062006></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=563355918-03062006>David
Wright</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=563355918-03062006><A
href="http://www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright">www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright</A></SPAN></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>