Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

[John Sullivan]

Michael,
Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl are illiterate in their native language. And since there is no dictionary, even the one's who are "literate" can do no more than approximate a correspondence between sound and letters every time they write (I'll anticipate objections here by saying that even though many spelling systems are in use by linguists and institutions, none of them have actually been codified in a dictionary). Second, since we are proposing an orthography (Andrews, Campbell, Karttunen) as opposed to a phonetic representation (and our system seeks to represent morphemes, more than anything else), there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Third, the majority of our consonants correspond to more than one sound in the spoken language, so people who will be learning the spelling system for the first time will probably want to know how that correspondence works.
John

On Sep 28, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Michael McCafferty wrote:

> I have been enjoying this discussion, and am happy to see the 
> dictionary taking shape. My question, I guess, is why, in a monolingual 
> dictionary, apparently designed for native speakers, one even needs to 
> discuss how to pronounce the sounds. Or am I missing something? 
> Probably the latter.
> 
> Michael
> 
> Quoting Jesse Lovegren <lovegren at buffalo.edu>:
> 
>> Some thoughts on the definition:
>> 
>> If the vowels are the four /i,e,a,o/ (but I don't know how the modern
>> variety on which the dictionary is based differs from Classical Nahuatl),
>> then I wonder whether it is necessary to note that the velum is closed,
>> since there are only oral vowels.  Also it might be preferable to note that
>> the jaw is swung wide open rather than that the tongue is at the bottom of
>> the mouth.  /b/, for example, is also produced with the velum closed and the
>> tongue at the bottom of the mouth.  But /a/ is the only sound that must be
>> produced wtih the jaw significantly opened up.  So I think that
>> articulatory-based definitions for the vowel sounds could be simplified to
>> something like:
>> 
>> /a/: the vowel with the mouth wide open
>> /o/: the vowel made with the lips close together and rounded
>> 
>> In the case of /i/ and /e/, there would need to be more than one property
>> listed to differentiate them, so it wouldn't be as neat a definition as is
>> possible with /a/ and /o/.
>> /i/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the
>> mouth almost closed
>> /e/: the vowel made with the front of the tongue close to the palate and the
>> mouth halfway opened
>> 
>> I'm glad to hear that the dictionary is becoming a reality.
>> 
>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:31 PM, John Sullivan <idiez at me.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Piyali listeros,
>>> One of the difficult things we've been doing lately is to define the
>>> letters of the alphabet for our monolingual dictionary. Joe Campbell
>>> participated in this project during the summer. I'm going to present it at
>>> the Maryland conference next month. I would like to start releasing the
>>> definitions one per day on this listserv and see what people have to say. So
>>> here's the long and short "a". Long vowels are shown here with a colon, as
>>> the macron has demonstrated in the past its ability to send nahuat-l into
>>> the land of giberish.
>>> John
>>> 
>>> A: piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl huehueyac tlen caquizti
>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan.
>>> 
>>> A: letter. Represents the long vowel that is heard when the velum closes
>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth.
>>> 
>>> A. piltlahcuiloltzin. Quimanextia tentzilincayotl cototztzin tlen caquizti
>>> quemman motzacua tocopac huan tonenepil yohui tocamatzalan.
>>> 
>>> A. letter. Represents the short vowel that is heard when the velum closes
>>> and the tongue moves to the bottom of the mouth.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nahuatl mailing list
>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Jesse Lovegren
>> Department of Linguistics
>> 645 Baldy Hall
>> office +1 716 645 0136
>> cell +1 512 584 5468
>> 
> 
> 
> 
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