Hello

[David Wright]

For publication, I think macrons look much neater, plus they help newcomers
to relate texts to Andrews' vocabulary (in the *Workbook* of the revised
addition of his *Introduction to classical Nahuatl) and Karttunen's
*Analytical dictionary of Nahuatl*. They are a real nuisance to type,
though. I like Paul de Wolf's solution, used in his *Diccionario
español-náhuatl* (México/La Paz, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Fideicomiso Teixidor/Universidad
Autónoma de Baja California Sur, 2003). He just hits the vowel key twice for
the long vowels. It looks strange at first, but its logic is evident. This
has the advantage of not being ambiguous, unlike colons and capitals. I'm
going to offer this option to my students next semester, since several have
complained that fighting the software distracted them from focusing on
linguistic issues. (I highly recommend de Wolf's dictionary, by the way;
it's a massive, comprehensive lexicon that integrates most of the major
vocabularies, restoring long vowels and saltillos wherever possible, with
access being through the Spanish translations.)

-----Mensaje original-----
De: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [mailto:nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org]
En nombre de Matthew Montchalin
Enviado el: Viernes, 24 de Noviembre de 2006 04:05 p.m.
Para: Michael McCafferty
CC: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Asunto: Re: [Nahuat-l] Hello

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Michael McCafferty wrote:
| There are not many, but more than that. Joe, do you have a list?
| One common verb contrast that comes to mind is /toka/ 'follow, chase'
| but /tooka/ 'bury, plant'. Both, of course, are spelled "toca".

Although many Spaniards prefer to spell it that way, I prefer to
spell the long vowels with an uppercase 'O' character.  Hence
"toka" means chase (with a little 'o') while "tOka" (with a big 'o')
means plant.  As soon as I'm done deciphering the Thesaurus file for
WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS), I'll be putting together a thesaurus file
with long vowels marked accordingly (so there's no need for
diacritical marks like macrons).

Now, that may not mean much to your Microsoft "Word" fanatics, but
to the rest of the world, we will have something much more practical
and useful to use.

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