Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

Wed Sep 29 20:59:02 UTC 2010

Yeh Galen shut up! (I just couldn't resist, especially after your invitation.)
	Our dictionary is only for the Nahuatl spoken in the area of Chicontepec, Veracruz, although that is stretching the truth a bit, because those who are writing it represent only three villages in the municipality. And as you know, from village to village within a single region there are often many important differences. Some day when I have a lot of money I'll get representatives from many regions together and have them do their own dictionary. At a later point (perhaps another life) we can combine the dictionaries into one. And we'd have to make sure that everybody uses the same orthography (this perhaps may require another universe).
	I think there are two main reasons I want to include what sounds each letter corresponds to in different environments, and they are not very scientific. First, since all native speakers who write now think that the purpose of their writing system is to reproduce sounds, when they see our dictionary and how the words are spelled, they are going to have a lot of objections. For example, why do we write voiced and devoiced "n" with the same letter? Why do we distinguish between the the spelling of /k/ before /k/ (c), a devoiced /w/ (uh) and a word internal aspiration (h), when they sound pretty much the same? I think we need a brief explanation of these kinds of things in the work in order to ease native speakers into the orthographic system. Second, (and this is the most unscientific reason), I think most people in academia (including the majority of Mexican educational federal, state, regional and union authorities, and many bilingual teachers) think that indigenous people a!
 ren't smart enough, and/or that their language isn't sophisticated enough as a tool, to do high level scholarship. This may sound a bit drastic, but I believe it is a fundamental part of Western ideology. This dictionary itself is a slap in the face to this way of thinking, and its purpose will be to serve as a tool for all Nahuas who wish to re-encounter their language and begin to use it for critical and creative thinking. I don't want to pass up an opportunity to demonstrate (here, through the description of sound mechanics) that Nahuatl is just as capable as any other language of expressing complicated ideas. So much for trying to separate research and ideology.
John

On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Galen Brokaw wrote:

> 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 asso!
 ciated 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 make!
 s 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
> 
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> 
> 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
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
> 
> 

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