David Wright on Otomi and Nahuatl

[Frances Karttunen]

I, for one, don't take it as surprising.  I would have been inclined  
to the same position, but what really would have solidified it for me  
was the 1986 Campbell, Kaufman, Smith-Stark paper in Language.

BTW, among the characteristics of Mesoamerican high rhetoric, both  
prose and verse, is repetition in pairs and pairs of pairs.  In verse  
it is shared codas of vocables such as "ohuaya ohuaya."  If one comes  
across even a fragment of a typical song in Nahuatl with an ohuaya  
coda, one has a sense of the likely whole: four verse-pairs, each  
pair with a common coda.

I WAS surprised at the time and sort of pleased to come across a  
fragment with an ohuaya in one of the Yucatec Maya Books of Chilam  
Balam.  Aha! I said to myself. It's not just Nahuatl.  It's a  
Mesoamerican verse form.  Sort of like finding out for all on one's  
own that not all sonnets are English and Elizabethan.


On Jan 31, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Michael Smith wrote:

> I would be interested in hearing commentary from linguists and  
> others about David’s very interesting paper in Acta Universitaria  
> (the link is in his latest post). I found this paper extremely  
> enlightening and very surprising. Who would have thought that the  
> political, urban, and social hierarchies in Otomi and Nahuatl  
> cultures were virtually identical in structure? Perhaps my  
> amazement comes from ignorance or naiveté. But in Mesoamerican  
> studies we are accustomed to thinking in ethnic terms, and  
> interpreting societies, cultures, and material culture in terms of  
> ethnic groups. The Nahuas were like this, and the Otomis were like  
> that. Maybe we have internalized the ethnic stereotypes in Sahagún  
> (Otomi blockheads, etc.). But I found David’s article enlightening  
> and I am having students read it.
>
> How common is his notion of a “essentially homogeneous  
> plurilinguistic culture” ? Is this a common occurrence in other  
> areas? Is his model surprising, or something to be expected? What  
> are the implications of this kind of model for understanding  
> prehispanic society in central Mexico? (please pardon my ignorance  
> here, I readily admit to being among the linguistically-challenged,  
> and I no longer have departmental colleagues like John Justeson to  
> pester about these things).
>
> Mike Smith
>
> Wright Carr, David Charles
> 2008   La sociedad prehispánica en las lenguas Náhuatl y Otomí.  
> Acta Universitaria (Universidad de Guanajuato) 18(especial):15-23.
>
> Michael E. Smith, Professor
> School of Human Evolution & Social Change
> Arizona State University
> www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9
> http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com
> http://calixtlahuaca.blogspot.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl

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