Tone in Nahuatl

[David Wright]

This is definitely off on a tangent so I'll use another subject title.
(Sloppy titling scrambles the threads in the archives.)

In reply to Jesse, who wrote:

"Niquitta ahmo innahuati.  I think that the authors are not familiar with
Nahuatl language and placed too much trust in their references.  It is
telling that they gave English verbs and adjectives as possible translations
of a noun.  Also in the previous paragraph they mention '...the two pitch
levels of the Nahuatl language...'  which is confusing, since one normally
speaks of pitch levels in the context of languages with lexical tone.  They
may be referring to stressed vs. unstressed syllables or heavy vs. light
syllables, but it is not clear."

I was just reading about tone and Nahuatl in a couple of articles. The first
is one I cited two days ago when discussing the kk > hk change:

Guion, Susan G.; Amith, Jonathan D.; Doty, Christopher; Shport, Irina A.,
“Word-level prosody in Balsas Nahuatl: the origin, development, and acoustic
correlates of tone in a stress accent language”, n.d., in Publications,
Susan Guion Anderson
(http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~guion/Guion_Publications.htm; access: Jul. 29
2009).

The other article is a manuscript by Whorf, unpublished in his lifetime and
rescued, with comments and annotations, by Lyle Campbell and Frances
Karttunen:

Whorf, Benjamin Lee (Lyle Campbell y Frances Karttunen, editores), “Pitch
tone and the ‘Saltillo’ in modern and ancient Nahuatl,” en International
Journal of American Linguistics (The University of Chicago Press), vol. 59,
no. 2, April 1993, pp. 165-223.

The first paper deals with the Balsas River varieties, as the title
indicates, where tone has acquired an exceptional role compared with other
varieties; the second uses examples collected in Milpa Alta (D.F.) and
Tepoztlán (Morelos) in 1930.

I found these articles especially interesting because I had been puzzled by
Rincón's and Carochi's discussion of tone related to vowel length (Antonio
del Rincón, Arte mexicana, 1595, book 5, chapter 1; Horacio Carochi, Arte de
la lengua mexicana, 1645, book 1, chapter 1, section 2). These passages from
Rincón and Carochi are commented by Campbell and Karttunen in the article by
Whorf.

Saludos,

David


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