Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

Wed Sep 29 22:08:51 UTC 2010

Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:

> 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 aren'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

Inin tlamantli huehueintin. Tlaxtlahui, John. Ca cualli.

Michael

>
> 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 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>
>

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