Chimalpahin

[Galen Brokaw]

Jose,
Hey, come on now, I appreciate your Socratic style of engagement because
it makes me articulate and defend my positions, but it makes me do all
the work. :-)

> I appreciate your thorough discussion of the care we must take in
> speaking about verbs, adjectives, and adverbs when analyzing Nahuatl.
> Your observations on linguistic ontology are most pertinent, and I do
> share the concern with transposing categories, whether grammatical or
> philosophical, including the term ontology. Are these categories and
> disciplines, and the concepts they imply universal? Do we introduce
> them with the same gesture by means of which we deny their applicability?


I do not deny in any general way the applicability of linguistic or
philosophical terms. I’m not as concerned with transposing linguistic
and philosophical terms as I am with the way we transpose them. In the
process we may find that some terms and concepts are useful as they are,
some may need to be modified, others perhaps discarded altogether in
favor of completely new ones. So, in this discussion anyway, I have not
denied the applicability of any terms and concepts, but I have argued
that we have to think about them differently sometimes. I don’t
automatically deny them, because I do think that there are certain
universals that gave rise to them. Whether we can determine what those
universals are is another question, because they are not the linguistic
and philosophical concepts themselves but rather something–which may be
merely a phenomenological process–that underlies them and that can give
rise to differing philosophical and linguistic conceptualizations.

> Your translation of Nahuatl phrases conveys the radical difference
> with Spanish or English but I wonder if our literal translations of
> Nahuatl do not incur in a reductive gesture that assumes transparency
> when you state: "So to say "red" or "pointed,"for example, you use
> words that literally mean it became a red pepper [chichiltic] and "it
> became a thorn" [huitztic] respectively."? Would the literality of our
> translations of chichiltic and huitztic correspond to the semantic and
> the phenomenal event in Nahuatl? Would the experience of chiltic be
> similar to that of anaranjado in Spanish which would translate into
> English as "it became like an orange" (and if we take the suffix
> "-ado" to imply "the presence of," we could render it as "with the
> presence of orange-likeness," or something in that line)?


I completely agree with you that translation, wether literal or not,
constitutes a reductive gesture and that my literal translation of the
Nahuatl does not necessarily correspond to the phenomenal event in a
Nahuatl speakers consciousness. I would argue that this is true of any
metalanguage, even our own. So when I engage in linguistic analysis, I
do not assume that I am identifying a phenomenal event; and I don't
think that I have made that argument. Phenomenal experience can be
conceptualized in different ways, and that conceptualization is often
revealed through linguistic systems, but the linguistic strategies used
to create words and many aspects of a linguistic system itself are often
just that, strategies. So, even though our own adjective “pointed” for
example may imply that the object is the result of an action, we do not
necessarily conceived of it that way. Similarly with “anaranjado,” as I
think you were implying in your message, when people use this word they
are necessarily thinking of the object described as having been some
other color and having gone through a process of coloring to become the
color orange. So, to describe this word as “becoming like an orange”
although accurate from the perspective of the linguistic system is
misleading if we assume that it describes a phenomenal event of
consciousness in the quotidian use of this word. I think we probably
agree on that. Nevertheless, the linguistic strategy itself is
interesting in its own right. In this case, it appears that the
linguistic strategy used to come up with a word for the color “orange”
was to take “naranja,” make it into a verb “anaranjar” (which may be
just a word specifically posited for this purpose, thus never really
used in this form) and then use the past participle in a parallel with
other past participle adjectives. Historically, I may be off, but I
think it illustrates the point. And the point is that these strategies
are definable in linguistic terms (and this is all I mean by linguistic
ontology: the nature of the linguistic system), regardless of whether or
not they reflect a deeper cultural or epistemological ontology.

> As for centetl, shouldn't we differentiate the qualified "noun," one
> stone, from the function of centetl as a numeral for counting round
> objects, perhaps tamales, but not tortillas?


Yes, we should. The question here of course is at what level should we
make this differentiation. Should it be a differentiation of linguistic
category (such as noun) or something else? This is one of the things
that a grammar works out.

> You state that Nahuatl is an oral language, but if the concept of
> orality is irremediably bound by circularity and dependence on
> definitions of literacy and grammaticality, what is the point of
> retaining this concept? Wouldn't it be more sound to speak of
> representations or transcriptions of speech and voice, rather than the
> reified notion that there exist oral languages out there without the
> ambiguity that is entailed by speaking about orality on the basis of
> written texts?


I’m not sure I really understand all of what you are getting at here.
You are probably right that the notion of an “oral language” carries
with it certain implications that I should avoid. I don’t know. I’ll
have to think about that. When I wrote “oral language”, I wasn’t trying
to introduce a category but rather delineate the parameters of a
practice. So we may not be so far apart on this.

> Should we read Chimalphain and Teçoçomoc as the last representatives
> of the Nahua intellectuals trained by Sahagun?


I don't know.

> Did a project of creating a Nahuatl written culture on a par with
> Latin and Spanish end with them?


No, I think John Sullivan's project is precisely engaged in this kind of
endeavor.

Galen