To Russell

[Henry Kammler]

Mahuizlisterotzitzintin

> > Preoccupation with individual words in Nahuatl and with place names in
> > particular is not likely to get continual reinforcement from the linguists
> > who look in on Nahuat-L.
>
> Again, I disagree.  Moreover, it's not as if this list is over-heating
> with messages.

Ke:mah! It's not been very busy on here lately.
Individual words can of course be a valuable source of data. Place
names are in many ways especially valuable because in them a part of
the history of the place is encoded. Likewise, place names and
personal names lead a life of their own in many languages and should
get attention as a specialized but integral part of language.
That doesn't necessarily mean that one has to be obsessed with
cracking the secrets in "Teotihuacan" (just look at how modern
Mexicans pronounce and reinterpret Nahuatl names: like Cuerna-vaca, ay
que caray; in a very similar fashion may Nahuas have reinterpreted
previous place names, you can bet).

>
>  As I said to you long ago, one cannot learn a
> > language word-by-word, and you do not have the right to demand that anyone
> > teach you a language that way or any other way by email.
>
> I don't think this is what Russell has been asking.  As far as I can tell
> from his messages to the list and our personal communication, he has had a
> legitimate desire to understand the place-name "Teotihuacan."

The analysis of words and phrases should be done thoroughly and it is
a good exercise to do that in depth. A page of in-depth text analysis
will yield better results for the student as well as for the data to
be extracted than just browsing through piles of text in a sloppy
manner, generally spoken. If place names should be the first in line
(especially *that* name!) is another question. It's fun to etymologize
when you are in Mexico, but beware, even a scholarly eye can be
tricked into some odd folk etymology.

What really bothers me is this overall striving for consistency. What
we do with Nahuatl grammar is what the logician would call
"subsumption". Even though we have a fairly good understanding of
Nahuatl, it would be a mistake to try and mold every little bit of
contradiction into our predefined inventory of terms, just ironing any
unevenness out. A language has intrinsic dynamics that we cannot fully
describe if we simply stick to what others before us have established,
however useful that may be. We have not cracked all secrets of our own
mother tongues so why should it be the case with Nahuatl? Exceptions
to established rules are very good pointers to other grammatical or
semantic categories that either have vanished or are just in a germ
state. They can reflect (aberrant) social uses of the languages right
down to the very idiosyncrasies. As long as we find indicators for
that any group of people actually did communicate that "abberrantly"
then there is something there for linguists to describe (if not
explain). We find that in spoken contemporary Nahuatl dialects as well
in this whole range of historical written sources and if there are
things that cannot be easily accounted for so far (Like Teo -ti-
huacan) then this is our perfect playground and this is what
fascinates at least me  about language.
just my two centavos, cuates

Henry

PS: anybody among those interested in place names found out what
Cuitlahuac is all about? But I don't wanna bore anybody...