Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:

Thanks for your note, John.

> Michael,
> Good question. First, the vast majority of native speakers of Nahuatl
> are illiterate in their native language.

But they are literate in Spanish, right?

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.

That's a good point.

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.

All good points. I guess what you send sounded more like a course in 
phonology than what I expect a dictionary to tell me. But, of course, 
there is no limit to what a dictionary can tell us.

Michael


> 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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>
>



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