Schools

[R. Joe Campbell]

David,

    When I saw your message over ten days ago, I was delighted at the 
question -- I would like to know the answers.  Why?  Because I'm curious 
about the house I live in.  I know a lot of people who live on my hallway
and when their doors are open, I stop by and lean on their doorframe and
talk for a while.  But there are a lot of floors closer to the foundation
than mine... and I think the elevator is out of service.

    The answers to your question would give all of us pleasure and 
perspective, but so far I haven't seen one even threecoming.
No!  Iztlacapahtiliztli!!  Bernard shared a genealogical fact with
us and I appreciated that.  Now, surely *someone* has another one
that they could contribute without doing any harm to themselves.

    It would be so easy for each list member to contribute what
they know (even if splinter facts) about how they got into Nahuatl,
who was helpful in their formation, and what they know about other
branches on the tree.

    Myself, I never took a course in Nahuatl.  My professor,
Ken Hale, went to Tepoztlan during Easter vacation for few
days in 1962 and took a five inch tape back to the University
of Illinois.  He totally assimilated it in a few days and then
entertained a group of us acting as our Nahuatl informant,
preparing for the summer field trip in Tepoztlan.
    Ken got to Tepoztlan about three days ahead of me in the
summer and seemed to have there for a year -- his vocabulary
was incredibly large and his understanding of word formation
was... again, beyond belief.

    Six weeks in Tepoztlan and a laborious term paper on verb
formation that I wrote after my return to Champaign was all of
my experience in Nahuatl before Indiana University asked me to
teach a series of NDEA funded courses.  I went to Hueyapan,
in the summer of 1970 to invite a young woman to act as a
language expert and work in the course with me.  We worked
together for two intense semesters and then I furthered my
learning of the language by teaching it alone for two more
years... and they didn't fully realize how little I knew.

    In 1974 I started working on translating Molina,
Nahuatl-Spanish, into English -- and succeeded in
learning a little more.  And from 1974 to 1985, I worked
on doing the morphological analysis for the same dictionary,
then moving on to doing the same thing for the Florentine
Codex.  ...and on ...and on ...and on.

    For the last twenty+ years, I've done fieldwork on various
Nahuatl dialects.

    And I'm still learning.  OK, I never had a classroom professor
in Nahuatl (never took an exam), but I wouldn't be doing Nahuatl
now if it hadn't been for Ken Hale.

Iztayohmeh,

Joe

p.s.  For quite a while, I have been intending to ask the listeros
if they would contribute to a list of places and resources for learning
Nahuatl.

    Who is currently teaching it?  Where?  What variety of Nahuatl?



On Sun, 21 May 2006, David Wright wrote:

> Estimados listeros:
>
> I've long wondered about how accumulated knowledge of Nahuatl grammar was
> transmited over the years, particularly during the 20th century.

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