Fw: Totlahtol

[Michael Swanton]

I am not sure what is inconvenient about a pair of simple, unambiguous writing conventions. Not only have some of the world's most widely written languages used such conventions without difficulty, but Nahuatl writers have also used them successfully for centuries. Orthographies and phonological representations are very different things.

One would be hard pressed to find an example of a writing system in one language that has not been influenced by another. I think people generally understand and accept that writing conventions reflect history. That history not only includes earlier sound changes, but also contact. Today, English speakers write with Latin letters (and not runes, ogham or cuneiform) because of their history. Poles write with Latin letters instead of Cyrillic for a similar reason. Persian speakers today write with a script derived from Arabic (and not Pahlavi, cuneiform or Sanskrit), which they in turn passed on to Urdu. Etc.

Doubtlessly such considerations of potential ambiguity and history informed Andrews, Campbell et al. in their pedagogic/philological orthography, since it makes use of these conventions. However, I am at a loss to explain how the "Carochi orthography", from which the proposal was derived, could possibly be qualified as being of little value. On the contrary, it has been exceedingly valuable for philological and linguistic investigation. Moreover, Launey's pedagogic use of it to teach the grammar of the old texts strikes me as quite sound, much in the tradition of the macron in Latin grammars or the overdot to indicate palatalization in Old English ones.


I know of no variety of Nahuatl with the phone [y].


________________________________
 From: BT Yahoo! <a.appleyard at btinternet.com>
To: Nahuat-L <nahuatl at LISTS.FAMSI.ORG> 
Sent: Monday, September 2, 2013 12:33 AM
Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] Fw:  Totlahtol
 



Michael Swanton wrote:-
> The "Carochi orthography" was the most sophisticated orthography used during the colonial period.
> We owe a great deal of our understanding of "Classical Nahuatl" to it. I find McCafferty's comments about it having "little value" to be utterly baffling.

An inconvenience with Spanish-influenced classical Nahuatl spelling is that how to spell the sounds [k] and [s] changes if they are followed by [i] or [e] or [y]. That is a carry-over from phonetic changes that happened to the sounds [k] and [g] and [kw] in Europe in Classical Latin as it changed into Vulgar Latin and then into early Spanish (and Italian and French etc); those sound changes did not happen in Nahuatl.

Citlalyani.
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