On te:cuhtli and other alleged sins

Fri Aug 21 08:13:09 UTC 2009

Hi everyone,

David Wright has referred to the use of spellings such as tecuhtli 'lord'
by "phonemically naive authors". I guess I must be one of them.

I do wish we could just acknowledge the validity of variant spellings,
provided such spellings are consistent and predictable. Ever since Andrews
revolutionized Nahuatl studies back in the '70s those learning on Nahuatl
have been subjected to charges that they are naive, ignorant, or
colonial-minded simply because they use <cuh> for /kw/. Andrews himself is
largely responsible for this dogmatic stance. He has fulminated against
this spelling and has even had the chutzpah to deplore Tezozomoc's alleged
lack of an elegant Nahuatl style. Although even princes of the house of
Tenochtitlan were subject to the same deficits in character and skill that
we are, it still seems amazing that a non-native speaker (or speaker at
all?) of Nahuatl, let alone Classical Nahuatl, for which there are no
native speakers left, would dare to utter such a pronouncement. Are we
really that far along that we can dare make such statements?

As for tecuhtli (te:cuhtli), David has rightly mentioned that there are
dialect variants. Spellings in Classical and Colonial-period texts such as
<tecotli> and <tecuitli> reflect this. We find the latter in the common
term <totecuiyo> 'Your (lit. 'Our') Lordship', 'Our Lord'. If, however, we
rail against the devices <cu> and <cuh> for syllable-final /kw/, we should
keep in mind that this is like railing against the use of German <tsch>
for a single phoneme in, e.g., no less a word than Deutsch 'German'. These
are simply spelling conventons, no more, no less, but conventions with a
long tradition. The problem lies not with the use of a digraph for <cuh>
but with the lack of attention given to the statement given in standard
grammars of Classical Nahuatl that there is no /u/ vowel in the language.
Thus, *all* instances of <u> in spellings must be signalling something
else, as in <hu>, <uh>, <cu> and, of course, the now shibboleth-like <uc>.
Fran Karttunen, whose dictionary and other work I greatly admire,
criticizes the use of <cu(h)> in her dictionary, following Andrews'
statement that those who use <cuh> simply show their ignorance of Nahuatl.
But we shouldn't forget: just as beginners (and non-learners) are prone to
pronounce <tecuhtli> as tay-KU-tli, so too are they likely to pronounce
<teuctli> as tay-UK-tli. These are the things one learns to avoid early in
the study of any language and its conventions. I remember a well-known art
historian from the U.S. Northeast once pronouncing Xipe as ZAI-pee (ZAI as
in sigh) and Tezcatlipoca as Tez-kat-LI-po-ka, with the <z> as in English.
Yes, I know, but she didn't profess to have studied the language. Should
we change the spellings to help her and others avoid these mistakes in
future. If so, to whose spellings? Phonemic spellings with single graphs
also need to be learned before they can be correctly pronounced.

So let's stop being pedantic and criticizing other people's preferences if
consistently applied and hallowed by tradition (including by several
members of the Motecuhzoma family). Otherwise let's get rid of all the
digraphs abounding in the spelling sanctioned by Andrews for Nahuatl. It's
not a religion, after all!

Best wishes,
Gordon

> Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:27:59 -0500
> From: "David Wright" <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>
> Subject: [Nahuat-l] Some grammar doubts
>
> P.S. I carelessly hit the send button before adding the long vowel marks
> (:). They're not essential to the matter being discussed, but for the sake
> of accuracy here goes the message again with the (probable) long vowels
> marked.
>
> *************************************************
>
> People pretty well answered Susana's questions. I just have one more
> comment
> to add. In the standard enhanced traditional orthography used by Andrews,
> Karttunen, Bierhorst, and others, the letter h can be a glottal stop /?/,
> or
> it can be used to write the phoneme /w/, when it appears in the digraphs
> hu
> (at the beginning of a syllable) and uh (at the end of a syllable). All of
> that was explained by Jesse. What I want to add is that in some colonial
> Nahuatl manuscripts we find the sequence cuh, apparently used to write the
> phoneme /kw/ (like /k/ produced with rounded lips), often written with the
> digraphs cu (at the beginning of a syllable) and uc (at the end of a
> syllable). In colonial practice cu and cuh were also used at the end of a
> syllable instead of uc. One very prominent example is tecuhtli (which
> would
> be written te:uctli in the enhanced traditional orthography used by
> Andrews,
> Karttunen, and Bierhorst, being the phonemic sequence /te:kwtli/, where
> the
> /kw/ is one phoneme as described above). This word, when used in compound
> nouns preceding other morphemes, is reduced to the root te:uc- /te:kw/.
> Examples of this are Mote:uczo:ma /mote:kwso:ma/, the name of two tenochca
> lords, and Tla:lte:uctli /tla:lte:kwtli/, a terrestrial deity. These names
> can be found in colonial documents (and even in modern academical texts
> written by phonetically naive authors) written as Motecuhzoma and
> Tlaltecuhtli, giving the false impression that they contain the syllable
> /cuh/, when in realty the sequence cuh is nothing more than the phoneme
> /kw/.
>
> This matter has been discussed on this list in past years, and the matter
> is
> complicated somewhat by the existence in a few modern varieties of Nahuatl
> of the form /te:kohtli/ (or something like that), sometimes written
> tecuhtli
> (there is no vowel /u/ in colonial Nahuatl except as an allophone or
> pronunciation variant of /o/), for example in Milpa Alta, D.F. John
> Sullivan
> provided a similar example from contemporary Huastecan Nahuatl, if I
> remember correctly. Karttunen suggested on this list that these forms may
> be
> "spelling pronunciations" influenced by traditional conventions in written
> texts, but as far as I could see the matter was not resolved to
> everybody's
> satisfaction.
>
> What I really wanted to say is that the letter h in the sequence cuh is
> probably superfluous. I suspect colonial authors added it because uh was
> used for /w/, so adding it to the digraph cu (for /kw/) merely reinforced,
> in a redundant way, the roundness of the lips when pronouncing /kw/, in
> addition to making it clear that cuh was not to be read as the syllable cu
> (that is, writing cu for /co/ and thinking of the allophone [u] for the
> phoneme /o/).
>
> Sorry for being a bit pedantic; I had envisioned a simpler comment when I
> started writing this post.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gordon Whittaker
Professor
Linguistische Anthropologie und Altamerikanistik
Seminar fuer Romanische Philologie
Universitaet Goettingen
Humboldtallee 19
37073 Goettingen
Germany
tel./fax (priv.): ++49-5594-89333
tel. (office): ++49-551-394188
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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