Fwd: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools

[Michael McCafferty]

----- Forwarded message from mmccaffe at indiana.edu -----
    Date: Fri,  2 Jun 2006 07:51:33 -0400
    From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu
Reply-To: mmccaffe at indiana.edu
Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Schools
      To: "R. Joe Campbell" <campbel at indiana.edu>

In grad school I wanted to take a language of the Americas. There was
only Zapotec and Nahuatl offered that semester. Before the semester
started I called the Zapotec teacher and he wasn't home. I called the
Nahuatl teacher, Joe Campbell, and he was home, and he was enthusiastic
about teaching the course. So, I signed up.

Then i spent two semesters daily with Joe in a Nahuatl class with one
other student. It was the best class i ever took, hands down. By the
second semester we were reading the Florentine codex.

After that i studied Andrews and Thelma Sullivan, Carochi, on my own,
and a few others. Then a few years later, I taught Nahuatl to three
successive beginning groups and two advanced groups at Indiana. When
the money dried up, I joined a "Nahuatl circle" that includes Joe and
Pablo Garcia, my best student.

That's my story.

Michael McCafferty



Quoting "R. Joe Campbell" <campbel at indiana.edu>:

> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>




----- End forwarded message -----


_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl