To Russell

[Mary Clayton]

Hi All,

>   Joe is very generous with his expertise, but he has a
> life and work of his own, you know.

     Actually, whether Joe has a life 'of his own' as apart from 'work of
his own' is open to question. [I consider myself the expert here. We're
married.] As most of you know, Joe is a teacher to his very soul, and
loves nothing more than providing instruction and information whenever he
can. Whether he would have anything to say about teotihuacan, I don't
know. [I read his mind, but not *all* the time.] In any case, as Michael
pointed out, Joe is presently out of town--not exactly on vacation, he's
visiting his mother, [Actually, I'm out of town also, but I have the
computer with the modem, he doesn't] so he is missing all of this.

     Actually, I didn't consider Russell's reference to Joe to be critical
but rather just jocular.

     In any case, I think Henry makes a couple of good points both in
favoring in-depth analysis of words and in expressing caution about giving
place names too high a priority in this study:

>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

Henry's other major point [quoted below] is also well-taken, and I think
it gets to the heart of what is troubling Russell.  When one looks at
one's own language, he *knows* where the fuzzy spots are, what doesn't
'fit the rules' etc. In a foreign language (and as Andrews puts it, a
'strangely foreign' language) it is hard to know when one has hit a real
rough spot and when one's own knowledge just isn't yet up to the job at
hand. Therefore, I think the questions being raised are interesting, and
worth worrying, though in the end I'm pessimistic about there being a
clear solution. But if one sees the learning process itself as the goal,
then surely this is a useful exercise.

>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.

     Sending greetings from the LSA Institute in Champaign/Urbana -- and
if you think Nahuatl is 'strangely foreign', you should see Ahousat, being
taught here by Emmon Bach and Katie Fraser. It not only has the voiceless
laterally released affricate (tl) of Nahuatl, it has a *glottalized* one
also, plus glottalized counterparts of 10 other consonants, but no
'ordinary' /b d g r l/

Mary