Rejoinder to Whitaker (Cross-post from Aztlan)

[Dodds Pennock, Dr C.E.]

Dear colleagues,
 
I share Michael's hesitation regarding this unidentified post. If we do not know the agenda or expertise of a poster then it is hard to know how to assess their work. I think perhaps we should be tolerant of writing in a language other than the post was composed unless we fear a political agenda, however. I myself am guilty of replying in English occasionally where the principal language of the discussion is Spanish for the simple fact that, whilst my reading Spanish is pretty good, my written Spanish is rather more laborious! I suspect this may well be the case in reverse for some Spanish speakers. 
 
I think perhaps Michael is right to fear a political agenda here, however. Much of the post is too obviously polemical and at times bordering on personal attack to invite serious criticism (the comparison with Stalin and the Nazis most notably!) and I fear that some of the latter part of the post misunderstand's the linguistic focus of Gordon's email.
 
Some of the early parts of this post are obviously drawn from the well-known article of Miguel León-Portilla, whose credibility is hardly in doubt, but certainly not all. The inference that all these documents are somehow essentially unreliable ("Todos los documentos que se pueden citar en uno u otro sentido son coloniales aunque sean escritos en nahuatl o de forma bilingue nahuatl español.") is basically applicable to any alphabetic text drawn from this period and would dismiss the possibility of any use of any post-conquest alphabetic documents. Although care must certainly be taken in the use of such documents, I do not believe so sweeping a case is made by any serious scholar and one which León-Portilla's own work directly contradicts. 
 
Yours,
Caroline
-------
Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock
Lecturer in Early Modern History
School of Historical Studies
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester
LE1 7RH

email: ced22 at le.ac.uk
http://www.le.ac.uk/history/people/ced22.html
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