Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

Wed Sep 29 20:24:07 UTC 2010

  Hi John,

Not to belabor Michael's point, but I still don't understand. The issue 
for me isn't so much why one would need to discuss how to pronounce 
sounds for native speakers, but rather the practicality and utility of 
doing this effectively in any dictionary.
Most people, regardless of whether they are learning to read and write 
in their native language or a foreign one, don't learn about the 
correspondence between letters and sounds from a dictionary. None of my 
English dictionaries define letters in phonetic terms. I should say that 
most of my Spanish dictionaries don't do this either, the DRAE does 
actually include an attempt to give a phonetic description of the sound 
represented the the letters.
It does seem that Spanish lends itself more to doing this than English. 
But in general, it doesn't seem to be a very practical or even a very 
accurate way to learn about the relationship between letters and sounds. 
Most people probably won't even be familiar with the terms used to refer 
to the articulatory organs (although I guess they could refer to the 
entries for unknown anatomical terms in the dictionary, hopefully with a 
visual illustration). But that isn't even the main issue.
If what you are proposing is an orthography as opposed to a phonetic 
representation, then I don't understand why you would need to define 
letters in the dictionary in phonetic terms. In fact, it seems to me 
that a universal definition would be impossible in many (perhaps most?) 
cases, and a comprehensive definition would be overly long and 
complicated for a dictionary entry. It seems to me that the fact that 
you are proposing an orthography rather than a phonetic representation 
doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that there is no one-to-one 
correspondence between letters and sounds. There is no one-to-one 
correspondence between letters and sounds primarily because alphabetic 
systems are largely phonemic rather than phonetic (although there are 
other reasons as well such as historical processes that create 
alphabetic redundancies). So in order to really define the sounds that 
are represented by any given letter, in addition to the "base" or 
"standard" allophone associated with a particular letter, wouldn't you 
also have to include an explanation of all of the other allophones and 
the linguistic environment in which they occur? It seems to me that this 
kind of explanation would be more appropriate for an encyclopedia than a 
dictionary.
But even if a dictionary did include a thorough phonetic definition of a 
letter, it doesn't necessarily codify the correspondence between a sound 
(or groups of sounds) and a letter (although I guess that depends on 
what you mean by codify).
In the dictionaries that I have (with the exception of the DRAE), the 
letters of the alphabet are defined merely as "the nth letter of the 
alphabet" or "any of the speech sounds represented by" that letter. I 
think the reason they define the letters in this way is because, in 
addition to the phoneme/allophone complication, in many cases, these 
letters represent different sounds in different dialects. If I 
understand your project correctly, you want this dictionary to be a 
standard reference that would function like a dictionary of any other 
language. So unless this is going to be a dictionary of a particular 
dialect (which one might argue is inevitable with Nahuatl unless you 
incorporate all the various vocabulary and differing definitions for 
words in use by all of the Nahuatl speaking communities), isn't it 
problematic to define the letters in phonetic terms? Maybe the level of 
generality with which you establish the correspondence between the 
letters and the sounds makes the definitions universal (i.e., so that 
they apply to all dialects)? Is that possible? Maybe it is possible for 
some letters/sounds, but I suspect that probably not for others. In 
cases where it isn't, wouldn't you have to include an explanation for 
the various dialects as well? Maybe you are already doing that. After 
all, you've only sent out three letters so far. So you can just tell me 
to shut up and wait for the more problematic letters that will be 
appearing soon.

Galen

But who is going to learn the correspondence from a dictionary?

On 9/28/2010 3:23 PM, John Sullivan wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nahuatl mailing list
>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
>

_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl