Schools

[David Wright]

Many thanks to Joe, for jumpstarting my request, and to all who came forth
with their stories. I'm still quite the novice myself, but I'll go on the
record and say that in spite of a couple of decades of collecting source
material and superficially dabbling in Nahuatl, I finally dove in about six
years ago, with the goal of translating nahuatl glosses in Otomi codices and
comparing lexical items (calques) between Otomi and Nahuatl to try and work
out the role of language in the multiethnic and multilinguistic culture of
late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexico. The Nahuat-l list, Joe
and Fran's Foundation Course notes and some tutoring by the late Cayetano
Reyes García of El Colegio de Michoacán got me off and crawling (I was going
to write "running" but I decided to be realistic). I managed to crack the
glosses and analyze the calques, which are in an appendix to my
dissertation, finished last year. To motivate myself to stick with Nahuatl,
and to share the modest but useful fruits of my efforts, I offered a seminar
called "Lectura del Nahuatl" to undergrad history students at the
Universidad de Guanajuato last year and again this year. The groups are
small but motivated, and after a semester everyone can hack out a rough
translation of a few paragraphs of 16th century central Mexican Nahuatl. A
big obstacle has been the lack of grammatical and lexical sources in Spanish
that incorporate the phonological advances since c 1975, so I've been
working on a basic Nahuatl grammar in Spanish, with a detailed system of
references, combining data from Campbell/Karttunen, Andrews, Lockhart,
Carochi, Rincón, Molina, Launey, and other sources. The examples are all
written out twice, first in traditional "Franciscan" orthography, then in
Andrews/ Campbell/ Karttunen's "traditional-phonemic" spelling, and with the
International Phonetic Alphabet where necessary. The idea is to get the
students used to both forms and train them to move back and forth: "ahora
pongamos nuestros lentes de rayos x para ver las vocales largas y los
saltillos". I'm still working the bugs out of the text and adding examples
from colonial sources.
 
David Wright
www.paginasprodigy.com/dcwright
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