Nahuatl Digest, Vol 125, Issue 8

[magnus hansen]

Dear Dr. Sullivan

I do believe you are being overly dramatic when you accuse the use of
non-spanish graphemes of being the straight way towards language death and
disolution of nahua culture.  This I think, comes from greatly
overestimating the value of a unified spelling system as the only means to
have unified language and culture. I don't think there is any empirical
evidence to back up that assumption. Many languages have had flourishing
literary traditions without a unified spelling system - among them English,
French, Spanish and Nahuatl. As I know you know classical texts do not show
any uniform spelling at all, only in the works of grammarians there are
taken steps towards developing standard orthographies - but this never
really made it out to the Nahua masses who kept writing their language in an
unstandardized manner.

 It seems that you believe that humans are not able to cope with the same
language being written in different ways - I don't know what would give you
that impression - all the Nahuatl speakers I have worked with have shown
quite impressive abilities to read texts from different dialects written in
different orthographies - often they don't even notice the orthography being
used when they read.  This of course is because they are completely unaware
of Molinas, Carochis and Karttunens valuable efforts towards standardizing
orthograhies and they simply read what the texts say.

The same is true for any number of languages in which spelling reforms have
taken place -  people are quite able to manage two different orthographies -
that is why i can read Danish texts written both before and after 1948, and
Greenlandic written both before and after 1973. And the reeson I kan reede
Chaucer and Shackespere who wrote before English hath a unifyed spellinge
systemme.

As for Barrios he studied linguistics with Barlow and his orthography is
meant to be phonemic not phonetic. That is reason he don't write devoiced
consonants, why he writes the geminate l in with two l's kaxtillan. And the
reason he doesn't write a devoiced w after possessed tonalama is that his
dialect doesn't have any such final w's. I find it quite unfair to accuse
Barrios of "widening the chasm" - for the reasons stated above - no one says
that people can't deal with two writing systems, and if anything his purpose
was the opposite.

Nobody accuses Mayan language writers using the standard orthographies
proposed by the the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala  that use both w,
k and s of widening the chasm between maya peoples and their past or accuse
the academys spelling systems of fragmentarizing maya culture or leading it
towards its extinction.

Magnus Pharao Hansen
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