Nahuatl Summer Language Institute IV at Yale University

[John F. Schwaller]

Nahuatl Summer Language Institute IV at Yale University
Summer 2001
Jonathan D. Amith

The Nahuatl Summer Language Institute at Yale University, now entering
its fourth year, is part of a comprehensive project to provide learning
and research tools in this language and to bring together experts in the
field of Nahuatl language and culture. In addition to discussing the
institute's progress to date and its plans for the immediate future,
this short report will hopefully encourage scholars who have worked on
Nahuatl to contact the institute and perhaps assist in its development.
We welcome participation by anyone interested in helping us meet the
goals of advancing Nahuatl studies.

One of the primary objectives of the institute is to create a learning
environment that will meet the needs of a wide range of
students-including historians, art historians, anthropologists,
linguists, and heritage language speakers. Besides receiving intensive
instruction in modern Nahuatl (15-20 hrs/week for 8 weeks), students
have attended invited lectures, workshops, and one-week supplementary
seminars by leading Nahuatl scholars from a variety of disciplines. Last
year James Lockhart (emeritus, UCLA) conducted the one-week seminar on
colonial Nahuatl; shorter invited lectures were presented by Louise
Burkhart (SUNY, Albany), Willard Gingerich (St. John's), and Alan
Sandstrom (Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne).
This coming summer the basic introductory course will again by taught by
Jonathan Amith. The basic text for the course-a reference/pedagogical
grammar and lexicon of the modern dialect spoken in Ameyaltepec,
Guerrero-is organized to facilitate comparison with colonial Nahuatl and
to provide a basic understanding of Nahuatl morphology and syntax that
will be of utility to those studying any variant of Nahuatl. This coming
summer will also be marked by the completion of the first draft of an
10,000-entry lexicon of the Nahuatl spoken in Ameyaltepec, Guerrero.
This will be used in the course and provide a significant addition to
the colonial sources already available. It will also provide a lexical
base for working with the modern grammar and learning exercises. The
dictionary will be placed online in the Fall of 2001 by the Linguistic
Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania. Guest lectures and
workshops for the 2001 introductory course will be offered by Louise
Burkhart, Willard Gingerich, and John Justeson (State University of New
York, Albany). Michel Launey will give the special one-week invited
lecture.

Given the interest shown for the first three institutes (9 students in
1998, 13 in 1999, and 7 in 2000), we are excited to announce that for
2002 we are now planning to offer, with funding from the Center for
Latin American Studies of the University of Chicago, a five- or six-week
institute for advanced instruction in Nahuatl. This unique course will
comprise a series of three workshops, each conducted by a leading expert
in Nahuatl. To date James Lockhart and Michel Launey have agreed to
participate; each will be in charge of intensive instruction for two
weeks. A third individual will subsequently be invited to complete the
team. Enrollment will be open to anyone who has completed the
introductory course during the first four years or to scholars who can
demonstrate a proficiency in Nahuatl equivalent to one year of study.
The goal of this new course is to provide, for the first time we are
aware of, advanced instruction in Nahuatl, thus enabling students to
attain a high level of proficiency in this language through direct
intensive work with experts in the field. Details of this workshop will
be announced in Fall 2001, both in print and on the website
(http://www.yale.edu/Nahuatl). The desire to offer this advanced course
represents a commitment of the institute to provide tools for training
the next generation of Nahuatl scholars.

The development of an electronic database of Nahuatl and its placement
online represents another goal of the Nahuatl institute: to develop and
make universally available a set of research and pedagogical tools for
research on and learning about Nahuatl. Mark Liberman and Steven Bird of
the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania have
provided invaluable assistance in developing a prototype search engine
for a web-based Nahuatl lexicon of Ameyaltepec
  (at http//www.ldc.upenn/hyperlex)
that will eventually comprise over 10,000
entries (Nahuatl to Spanish and English). It will be linked to an
electronic version of the reference/pedagogical grammar in an effort to
solve a major problem for instructional material in less commonly taught
languages: how to provide the grammatical and pedagogical context for a
dictionary while furnishing the appropriate lexical base for students to
implement the language skills they learn through a grammar. Interactive
exercises will accompany each lesson, offering the possibility of
learning Nahuatl at a distance (a preliminary version of this effort can
be viewed at http://www.yale.edu/nahuatl) The U.S. Department of
Education, through its International Research and Studies Program, has
granted two years of support to develop these materials for classroom
and research use as part of a Nahuatl Learning Environment. The final
product will include a lexicon, grammar, exercises, drawings and
photographs, and sound files. Additional support for the Nahuatl Summer
Language Institute and the Nahuatl Learning Environment has been
provided by Yale University, the Latin American Studies Consortium of
New England, and the University of Chicago Center for Latin American
Studies through funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
and the U.S. Department of Education.

For more information, including application materials to attend the 2001
intensive summer institute, please contact the coordinator of the
institute at jonathan.amith at yale.edu (503/831-3151) or visit the
institute website at http://www.yale.edu/nahuatl. Scholars who have
worked on Nahuatl and wish to discuss their possible participation in
future institutes or in jointly developing resource materials for
research on and teaching of Nahuatl are cordially invited to contact the
institute or the Council on Latin American Studies at Yale
(latin.america at yale.edu or 203/432-3420).



Jonathan D Amith
1460 James Howe Rd
Dallas, OR 97338
Tel. 503/831-3151