Hippocrene dictionary

[Galen Brokaw]

I have only sporadic access to email right now, so I am coming kind of
late to this discussion. Also, I will apologize in advance (although I
am writing this after finishing what comes below) for the length of
this email. I am in Southern England right now without an umbrella, and
it has been raining. And to get from where I am checking my email to
wherever else I can go, I would have to get wet. So, rather than do
that, I figured I would subject you to some of my perhaps senseless
ramblings. :-)

I would just point out that the situation of the Nahuatl language makes
the issues discussed in this thread very complicated. First, the
expression of objects, places, concepts, etc. that did not originate in
a Nahuatl context requires some kind of negotiation between Nahuatl,
the object or concept, and often the language in which these objects or
concepts were originally articulated. Sometimes that means using loan
words; other times it may mean coming up with a Nahuatl equivalent; or
sometimes a combination of the two. But these negotiations happen
naturally in communicative situations between native speakers. Given
the fact that there is no official national or international body that
makes decisions on what is permitted and what is not for Nahuatl such
as is the case for Spanish, this means that for many Nahuatl lexical
and grammatical elements, there will probably never be a "standard" to
which one can refer. (Of course, even in the case of Spanish and other
national langauges, this "standard" is misleading). This may be
frustrating for people like us who tend to think in terms of "standard"
language; but it probably more accurately reflects the nature of
language and language change.
It may be that the Nahuatl teacher made up the word tepoztelollotl, but
maybe that is the way one community of speakers refers to a train.
You can have the same experience with words that are clearly Nahuatl in
origin. I learned a colloquial expression from a native Nahuatl
speaker; and when I reproduced it for another native speaker from
another area, he had no idea what it meant or how it was used.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is a pragmatic dimension to
communication that is not captured in dictionaries. Even the native
speaker who translated the term literally as "metal corncob" may very
well have understood the term to refer metaphorically to a train in a
communicative context. Even though this was not a previously
encountered metaphor, the pragmatic dimension of the communicative act
might have made it clear.
With regard to the more general issue of inventing Nahuatl words as
opposed to just using loan words: given that Nahuatl is not the
official language of a modern nation state that has an interest in
standardizing the language, I don't know how you could call this
elitist. Although the thing with French is a purist position, purism in
Nahuatl isn't necessarily elitist. But I see the general point. For me,
the problem here isn't so much that it is elitist as that it is
difficult to impose that kind of standard without the institutional
power that comes with national languages, formal schooling, etc. Native
speakers can certainly invent Nahuatl names for objects and concepts
new to the Nahuatl language. But they have to convince the community of
speakers to which they belong to accept these new terms. If they do,
this means that there will be a lot more variation from one community
of speakers to another than in national languages. But it can be
frustrating if you get misled into thinking that topoztelollotl is
commonly understood as train and it turns out to be one of the pet
terms invented by some guy who is trying to impose it on the rest of
the Nahuatl speaking and and Nahuatl learning world when in reality
most (or perhaps all?) native speakers just use the Spanish word "tren."
So, ultimately, any dictionary will have to be either community
specific; or if it aspires to be more comprehensive, it will have to
give multi-regional listings with the source of each definition. I
think this is one of the things that John was saying the dictionary
does not do: it doesn't tell you where these definitions come from, if
they are specific to a certain community, shared by some or most
Nahuatl language communities, or invented specifically for the
dictionary itself.
I haven't looked at the dictionary, but from what John and some others
have said, it seems to me that this is what is so problematic about it:
it seems to want to act like a national language dictionary, but
Nahuatl is not a national language. The point is not that they can't or
shouldn't invent words like Checkoslavakia. Why not? This can be an
interesting exercise. Personally, I don't think I would have much use
for such a dictionary, but there are people interested in reviving
Nahuatl within non-traditional communities and contexts for whom such a
dictionary might be useful.
But any such dicitonary should be very clear about what it is doing so
that people are not misled into thinking that it is some kind of
universal, definitive, Nahuatl dicitonary. Of coure in the case of
Checkoslavakia, it is probably clear to most people that this word is
not one that has come up much in native Nahuatl discourse. But there
may be other words that are not so obviously esoteric in daily Nahua
life. I guess the point would be that they should be honest about the
fact that they are participating in an exercise of linguistic
innovation and attempting to set some kind of standard. Then, it would
be up to any given linguistic community to adopt or ignore the lexical
items proposed.
For scholars interested in the language as it is used, for such a
dictionary to be useful and in any way authoritative, we would have to
wait until these items were actually adopted by some community, or
until some revivalist community is created that used them.

Galen








Quoting micc2 <micc2 at COX.NET>:

> Tlazcamati for your words Stephanie,
>
> I just think that we should be careful of creating words that will
> never
> be used by the "common folk"  It is  easy to create words that will
> serve no purpose
> except to show how adroit a person is at manipulating a language.
>
> especially when beginners like me are taught  these "new words" as
> canonical words that imply wide usage, we might end up talking
> nonsense
> to native speakers who might look at us with bemusement.
>
> Many years ago a "nahuatl teacher" told me that to say "tren"
> (train)
> you said:  tepuztelollotl.   I said this word once to another
> Nahuatl
> speaker, one who did not
> put himself  out there as a "maestro"  and  she said I had just said
> "
> it is a  metal corncob"......hmmmm......
>
>
>