Piltlahcuiloltzin ixitlauhca

[Alec Battles]

> 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.

Have you considered the aesthetic dimensions of the DRAE? (It's my
second favorite dictionary in my library.)

My favorite dictionary (in my possession I should say) is the Arabic
mo'jem al-wajiz. Written at a high school level, it nonetheless
manages to be quite beautiful by means of tireless definitions, using
Qur'anic passages for rare/antiquated words. If something is
aesthetically pleasing, then it should make a good cultural artifact.
Isn't precision more in line with the European side of Mexico than
with the North American side?

Sorry for speaking so generally, but this is the internet after all.

I would love for Nahuas to begin reading and writing their language in
a literate way en masse, especially because of a book that essentially
allows them to become experts in their own language.

Next stop: Nahuatl video games, newspapers, and internet chat rooms!

> 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?

It's not possible. In general alphabets dilute spoken diversity, and
this is the problem with written language in my opinion. Speech varies
widely from place to place, but scripts do not. And even if every
tribe on earth had its own script the meanings of the letters would
soon be diluted by the passage of time. Hence the more widely your
script is dispersed across spacetime, the less it actually relates to
the way people speak.

The most extreme example in this case is Chinese. Consider, however,
that Chinese is also exceptional at preserving spoken diversity. Until
Mandarin became the national language of China, Classical Chinese
functioned much the same as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world,
with the added benefit that speakers of any dialect could pronounce
the script as if it were written exclusively for their dialect!

For examples of this, look at the recordings of the 300 tang poems on
librivox.org -- some of the more well-known ones can be found in up to
10 dialects of Chinese. These are up-to-date modern dialects
pronouncing Characters that stretch back millenia in the time
direction and thousands of miles in the space direction, as if the
poems came from their hometown's own oral tradition.

All that to say, I wish for the Nahuas sake that this were not an
alphabet, but a well-researched and at least partially syllabic
writing system. The reason for that is that each syllable could be
pronounced slightly differently by each dialect, but retain its shape.
In that case, precise phonological descritiptions would be

Because the grammars and syntax of the dialects vary widely, Mandarin
today functions exactly as MSA does in the Arabic-speaking world.

That's a bit of a fantasy, but I couldn't resist. I'm enjoying this
discussion, the regular postings by John Sullivan, and I enjoy the
fantasy of the Latin script playing no part in the future literacy of
an ancient and distinguished tribe, as well as the Finnegans Wake-like
excitement of monolingual dictionaries. If I were to go on about this
stuff to my wife, I'd get very little airtime. Thank the modern
savants at Google and DARPA, whose direct ancestors I count among the
North American astronomers and not among Europeans.

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