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Having another look at this article my attention was caught by the Language Prehistory subsection. I notice that it only refers to, and draws information from, T. Kaufman's article. Having read that article, I was wondering just how reliable its conclusions are. Please note that I am not asking this as a way of attacking the article or its author. I am not a specialist on the history of Nahuatl and I lack sufficient criteria to take a stand myself. Perhaps my question would be better worded as: "What is the standing of this article (which is now quite old, so it must have one) according to current academic opinion in the field?" (By the way, although the Wikipedia article refers to it as K's 2001 article, the latter is based on his work from as early as 1989, and 2001 only being the latest of several revision dates given given at the beginning of the text.) I cannot evaluate the data in the article, except to say that it looks interesting, but as a "lay" reader, the assertions in the article about the prehistory of Nahuatl strike me as being built on a rather longish chain of mutually dependent, unproven conjectures, which is not a crime either, but in contrast with the apparently spectulative nature of that content, I find the tone of the article unexpectedly self-confident. Also not a crime, but if I am right about all these assessments, then the conclusion would be that although Kaufman says A = B, Wikipedia may be better off leaving it as "it has been suggested that A = B". Which it does, I admit, but I was wondering if either (a) the hypotheses mentioned are backed by other scholars (and we could then say so in our article) or (b) there are alternative viewpoints which might be added, so that this section does not hang on the conjectures of one scholar. Any thoughts from those of you who know your way around this subject better than I? Please do correct/educate me if I'm just wrong to think this!
Also: shouldn't the article by Kaufman be listed in the bibliography as well as referenced in the notes? -- A R King 11:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. I was just wondering, mainly, and also curious to know what somebody knowledgeble as you are actually thought about this. I don't know as much as you about Terence Kaufman, although I'm familiar with Campbell, Kaufman & Smith-Stark, "Meso-American as a Linguistic Area" in Language 62:3, 1986, pp. 530-570 which I have consulted many times. Maybe Kaufman is the kind of writer who is so very knowledgeable that he tends to make leaps that make perfect sense to him but leave some humbler readers behind who can't keep up with him because we simply lack access to (or the capacity to process?) the immense data feed that is actually sustaining his thesis. If so, that doesn't make him wrong, it just makes the rest of us bewildered! I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt (perhaps he deserves it), but as they stand on the page, sometimes one seems to be asked to take too much on faith. For example, on purely linguistic grounds and with the data that he supplies, I feel he is running too fast in his conclusions about which morphological affixes in historically attested Nahuatl "must" have developed from clitics. I am perfectly willing to concede that they may come from clitics, but how it is that he knows they do escapes me, as I seem to be able to imagine other possible explanations - perhaps through sheer ignorance on my part, but how can I know that unless the author explains himself? So all in all I'm left wondering, on the basis of the text as such, how methodologically trustworthy his conclusions are. (I mention the clitics example because it's in an area I can at least begin to get my teeth dug into, as opposed to Krakatoa and all that, which is all Martian to me!
I do have Campbell's Pipil book, so if you need to know anything specifically just ask me. He has several pages of discussion of theories about the origins of the Pipils (as I'm sure you know). Cheers, -- A R King 15:02, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Lent is the past of lend. Except for dialectal use, I believe loan as a VERB (synonym of lend; past and participle: loaned) is a distinctive feature of US English. I have lived in both Britain and the US, but to me the use of loan as a verb just sounds/looks stylistically inappropriate in a text in "encyclopedic" register, i.e. too vernacular. In any case, loaned and lent would be synonyms. But the fact is that, if I am not mistaken, in linguistics, when talking about words from one language being adopted in another language it is not usual in English to employ either lend OR loan as a VERB, but rather borrow. Loan IS used as a noun, however. Therefore we either speak of Loan(word)s from Nahuatl in other languages or or Words borrowed from Nahuatl in other languages. -- A R King 08:32, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
What I'm saying is that "lent" and "loaned" are both grammatically correct (but of the two, "loaned" is more markedly colloquial), but that neither of these are as common in linguistic contexts as "borrowed". -- A R King 13:23, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with A R King - as far as I'm aware, "loan" is, in standard English usage, only a noun - not a verb. I see that "lent" has been changed back to "loaned" - I agree that "lend" is not commonly used in the linguistic sense. I am going to change this to "Words borrowed from Nahuatl in other languages", as A R King suggests. Aiwendil42
-- Lavintzin 04:44, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Like Lavintzin, I also declare for what it's worth that I haven't been involved in any changes in the article either.
And for what it's worth, I still think I'm right about this, based on both my general competence in English and my experience reading linguistic texts in English. Probably the most reliable way to resolve the doubt (other than just reaching a consensus here) would be through an empirical corpus survey, but to do this systematically is probably not practical or economical. We can, however, look at appropriate texts and locate examples, and I shall pull a few off the nearest bookshelf as I write. Before I start quoting, I remind you that I am suggesting that common usage in such contexts includes the following possibilities: (a) as a noun: "loan" or "loanword" (I have also come across "borrowing", actually); (b) as a verb: "borrow". As regards the verbs "lend" and "loan", I repeat that while both exist in English, "lend" is more appropriate in formal style; but I am also saying that as linguistic terms, neither of these is commonplace (but if I had to use one, it would definitely be "to lend", not "to loan").
Okay, for my random survey I have chosen the book on my shelf that looks like it's most likely to contain discussion of the concept in question and which constitutes, I think, an impeccable specimen of a "prestige linguistic textbook", and this turns out to be Historical Linguistics by Theodora Bynon, published by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series in 1977, but mine is the revised and corrected edition of 1983. The first observation is that in the book's Index, there are entries for "loan-words" (also for "loan translation") and for "borrowing", but none for "lending" or ??"loaning". I have followed up index references and quote sentences containing any of the terms relevant to this discussion, which I shall put in bold. Unfortunately time limitations have not allowed me to do this exhaustively for all the indexed references in the book, so I've just copied as many as I could in the time available.
pp. 180-1:
Conversely the Low German dialects of the north all have some words with High German consonantism, which are clearly loans. It is these loan-words from High German...
p. 217:
We are not here immediately concerned with the procedure whereby words are identified by the linguist as loans, but rather with the pehnomena associated with the transfer of lexical material across language boundaries as known from the study of loan-words after these have been established as such. We may however briefly say at this point that these words are considered to be borrowed from Latin because they are innovations in both Old English and Old High German... Their identification as loans from Latin...
p. 219:
In the case of German some of the words must have been borrowed early enough for...
same page:
...it would appear that Kitte must have been borrowed while the initial consonant was still a [k]...
and:
The reflexes... could then be accounted for in the same way as being due to borrowing at different periods...
p. 220:
...its source word must have been borrowed before this took place.
p. 221:
These changes can be explained as due to the word stress having been shifted during the borrowing process...
and:
We may therefore postulate for these loan-words...
and:
It will be seen from the above examples that where loan-words are concerned...
On the other hand, I am forced to admit (with slight embarrassment) that the book also says this (p. 217):
For our first example of "loaning", or "borrowing", we will take...
There is a footnote reference following the word "borrowing" here which discusses the practice of using these terms in linguistic texts, which makes two points: first, that neither of the words is really strictly accurate, but "these are the established terms" nevertheless; and secondly, that the term "loan-word" originated as a loan-translation from German Lehnwort. But I will still stick to my guns because I suspect that the observed usage of the author herself speaks more loudly than this metalinguistic comment with regard to the actual use or not of "loaning", which I don't believe anybody actually writes in linguistics texts, apart from this reference. But if somebody can show I'm wrong, go ahead! --
A R King
07:36, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Languages tend more to "sucking words up" than to "spitting them out".
Seems to me there's a natural semantic reason borrowing is spoken of more often than loaning in linguistic use of this (rather poor) metaphor. Speakers normally take words from other languages (or accept them under various forms of prescription) — they adopt (and sometimes adapt) them. We have no verb for widely using a lexical item of one language in some other language, but convention gives us borrow [+object] [+indirect object] — e.g. English borrowed garage from French. Semantically, French did not loan us the word, whether or not verbal usage of loan is acceptable in formal contexts or not. This is where the metaphor breaks down. Use of a word originating in a foreign language is metaphorically like using money that originates with (or continues to rightly belong to) someone else. However, this metaphor only works from the perspective of the recipient, not from that of the benefactor. I would guess the metaphor arose because of the apt way it captures the idea of "filling a gap".
I would suggest our instinctive discomfort at hearing *garage is a word loaned from French to English, or *English loaned the word garage is because verbal uses of loan still properly imply movement from benefactor to beneficiary. The technical metaphorical use in linguistics has not (yet) become so isolated from the metaphor that it can be comfortably used without the full associations of colloquial forms of the verb intruding. This is unlike say manipulating, which has technical implications in psychology, that no longer suggest to anyone anything to do with use of the hands.
It's a fascinating thought that the word borrow in this linguistic context stems from the kinship of English and German, that allows compounds like loanword to superficially resemble the agglutinated form Lehnwort. German linguistics does not speak of languages lehnen words to others do they? If German also has Lehngeld, Lehnwort means something subtly different in German lexical choice than loanword does in the context of English. Alastair Haines ( talk) 01:48, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
I've made this image trying to show the extent of nahuatl in modern and historical times - the yelow colour shows the approximate area where classical nahuatl is thought to have been used as a lingua franca or a prestige language spoken by the ruling classes. The orange area is the places where there is known to have been nahuatl speaking populations at the time of the conquest. And the red areas is where nahuatl is spoken now. The map has the drawback that it is quite impressionistic because we obviously don't know the exact boundaries of nahuatl populations or lingua franca use before the conquest. I think it illustrates well the decline of the nahuatl languages - but I am uncertain if that is enough to weigh up the probable inaccuracies. Do you think it is useful enough to warrant inclusion? Maunus 09:39, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
(Copied over from User talk:Lavintzin)
Your recent change to Nahuatl - Most populous indigenous languages
I think that your recent edit [8 Feb] although warranted because what the article was saying was untrue, obscured an important point, namely that Nahuatl, when counted as one language rather than a group of languages, is the amerindian language with most speakers along with Quechua and Guaraní. K'iche maya which is the most populous mayan language has only 1,000,000 speakers according to the figures given here - although The mayan language family has more speakers than nahuatl but it is comprised of thirty different languages (it also has more speakers than the combined speaker of Uto-Aztecan languages but that is beside the point). I hope you see my point and that you can think of a way of wording the sentence so that this point isn't lost. Basicaly I am saying that there is no need of adding "along with the mayan languages" to the phrase - but maybe the entire phrase as it is is redundant. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:05, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
In the article we describe nahuatl as one language with dialectal diversity - in the article on mayan languages we describe them (in accordance to the views of most Mayan peoples as expressed throuhg the ALMG) as disctinct languages. That means that the comparison of Nahuatl to Mayan is not justified by what we write in the articles. I think that maybe the most populous language comment is better left out altogether. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I suggest that the Spanish practice of moving Tlaxcaltecs to missions to help convert various peoples to Christianity resulting in spreading Nahuatl should be mentioned. I was reading tonight about Nahuatl loanwords in Coahuilteco, which is rather on the fringes of the Mesoamerican area. It's interesting that there were non-native Nahuatl bilinguals that far north. – ishwar (speak) 04:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
If dialects are mutually unintelligible, they should be considered as languages, not dialects.-- Ornitorrinco 17:00, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
There's nothing else called Nahuatl that the language would need to be disambiguated from (well, there's Nahua, but "Nahuatl" is not generally used to refer to the people in English), and it would also avoid the language/dialect issue. -- Ptcamn 16:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Could somebody please record and upload a pronunciation of "Nahuatl (['na.watɬ])" English doesn't contain the ɬ sound ( voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) and I don't think I'm the only person reading this article who is curious as to how to correctly pronounce "Nahuatl". Patiwat 18:29, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Nahuatl is the language spoken by the native people
No way zero monoglots. There are *lots* of people in a number of areas who are monolingual. Many more are able to use Spanish only for basic buying and selling, catching a bus to where they want to go, etc. -- Lavintzin 00:09, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
The full list of dialects in the infobox seems a bit excessive. Could we change this to a summary or a reference to a section in the article instead? Peter Isotalo 11:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree and have tried to change this, but somebody needs to tweak the infobox structure. It's not straightforward to change. I thought you could put in the infobox a link to the Nahuatl Dialects article. -- Lavintzin 00:09, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
What happened to the rather large discussion history of this page? ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:14, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I heard that this language will become compulsory in the curriculum starting 2008, just wondering what Nahuatl language it is? Enlil Ninlil 06:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Can we get a few sentences added on why Nahuatl /s/ is commonly spelled as z rather than s? Mind you, "Spanish" is not an explanation in itself, since they do recognize /s/ = s too. It can't be 100% random, can it? -- Tropylium 13:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Based on the current state of this article, and based on the good article criteria at this time, especially criteria 2 (b), with regards to verifiability and inline citations, this article does not appear to meet the standards of good articles. As such, a discussion has been initiated at good article reassessement to decide what can be done to bring it up to standard. Please see that page for further discussion. -- Jayron32| talk| contribs 04:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
I am beginning a major reconstruction of the Nahuatl article, the aim is to reduce redundancy, repetition and trivia while maximizing the level of information and references. I have begun with removing the overview section and in stead making the lead conform better to WP:LEAD. I have also added a history section before the Genealogy and Geography sections describing the precolumbian, colonial and modern history of the language - this goes instead of the "linguistic prehistory" section which was only based on Kaufman 2001 and which was completely incomplete. The Geography section I have provided with sources, namely a reference to the most accessible description of the Nahuatl dialect of each region. Hopefully once this work is well underway the article will deserve its GA status and then we can move on towards an FA-run. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
By what formal sense is Nahuatl identified as a "Chicano language" (Cf. the navigation template at the bottom)? Anyone else think this to be a problematic identification...?-- cjllw ʘ TALK 08:32, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
OK thx, I've removed Nahuatl from the template and the template from this article. -- cjllw ʘ TALK 00:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
"For a list of words relating to of the Nahuatl language, see the Nahuatl language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary" isn't very elegant - is there a better way to use the template to link to Wiktionary? (Found this while hunting for "to of" to correct, for WP:TYPO!). PamD ( talk) 18:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Hey, Manaus requested that I give the article a quick review to see how it is coming relative to the good article criteria with the idea of getting the article relisted. For the record, the article's prose is quite well written, and it seems to be rather comprehensive and neutral. Still, there are a few issues, mainly with referencing, that may cause a hangup with regards to a GA review:
Other than the above referencing issues, the article was very good. I enjoyed reading it, and it is quite informative without being overly technical or detailed. Fix those referencing issues, and you will most certainly have a GA on your hands. In fact, I would say that the article would be quite close to featured article status once those referencing issues are fixed. -- Jayron32. talk. contribs 14:17, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I would like the consonant and vowel tables to appear side by side rather than one above the other. How can this be done? ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Although the article currently says warning 66kb I have calculated the readable prose to be only 35kb - so there is no need to split the article yet. And by now I am just about finished. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 15:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there any environment conditioning the split? This is not mentioned here.
Or is it unknown? Or too complicated to fit within the bulleted list? If so, maybe there could be a mention in the footnote ref about why the details of this are omitted. – ishwar (speak) 17:20, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
I have a factual question about the comment at the end of the Pre-Colombian subsection, which I reproduce here:
"This group were the Mexica who during the next 300 years founded an empire based in Tenochtitlan, their island capital. Their political and linguistic influence came to reach well into Central America and it is well documented that among several non-Nahuan ethnic groups, such as the K'iche' Maya, Nahuatl became a prestige language used for long distance trade and spoken by the elite groups, and a classical language among the educated."
I understand this to be referring to the period prior to the arrival of the Spanish, and I'm curious to know how whether it is firmly established to have been so. I ask because while I'm no historian (obviously!), I thought the Spanish had been instrumental in spreading "classical" Nahuatl as a prestige lingua franca over a wide region (which would include Central America, or course). This account seems to be saying this had already happened before they came (at least as far as the parts of Central America mentioned).
So perhaps Maunus or someone can just say a few words to clarify that question more explicitly? -- A R King ( talk) 08:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
One expression of "Nahuatl as a lingua franca" that survives into present-day daily life (whether or not ordinary people are aware of it) is of course in modern place names. There are even cases such as the Guatemalan town of Quetzaltenango (a transparently Nahuatl name), in the heart of "Maya country", which is so called officially and on the maps, but which to this very day is widely referred to by the locals by the quite different Maya name of Xela. (This is so well known that the information even finds its way into tourist guide books.) I've long been curious about the details of how this happened. I used to have this image in my mind of Spanish mapmakers surveying the country in the company of their Mexican (Nahuatl-speaking) interpreters, the latter providing (from where?) Nahuatl designations of each place which were then transcribed onto the official maps and legal documents... I wonder how realistic that could be and if the answer is: Not very, then how and when all those Nahuatl place names in non-Nahuatl-speaking territories did come about. Certainly, the pre-existence of "Aztec" Nahuatl as a firmly established lingua france in the area would provide one plausible explanation. But if so, where does that leave the well-known assumption (to which I refer above) about the Spanish having been responsible for the spread of Nahuatl all over the area? -- A R King ( talk) 10:01, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
"Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua the same happened in El Salvador, Nicaragua and in Honduras where Nahuatl speakers settled in communties named Mexicapa after them."
In San Salvador the "barrio" said to have been founded by the Mexicans accompanying the Spanish is to this day known as "Mexicanos". Is this fact sufficiently significant to merit expanding the above sentence to: "...named Mexicapa or Mexicanos after them"? -- A R King ( talk) 09:05, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't know quite what to make of the wording of this sentence:
"Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name, is spoken as far south as El Salvador, by a small number of speakers."
As someone who has worked intensively on this language and written about it on Wikipedia, I try to be careful to tread carefully (even giving the benefit of the doubt against my own judgment if expedient) around issues on which scholarly and informed opinion is divided or uncommitted. Here the issues in question are: (a) whether this is a separate language or a "Nahuatl dialect", and (b) whether or not the name of the language is actually "Pipil". I am not asking to have my own opinions abided by on these things, only that other editors try to be as balanced as I am trying to be.
The words "Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name" sound like they are aimed at driving a particular point of view home - that this is "a Nahuatl dialect", not a language, and that its name is "Pipil" - much more insistently than anything said in the article about other universally recognised dialects of Nahuatl (some of which also have their own names). That pointedness is gratuitous as far as I can tell, and as such I take it as an invitation to expound my own point of view here, which differs from that expressed.
I would say (and do say so, when speaking for myself) that the real name of the language is not Pipil but Nawat. My main reason is that that is how its speakers refer to it; not a final argument (German speakers refer to their language as Deutsch, yet we still call it German in English), but a point to consider. A further point we might want to weigh up is that in El Salvador, where the language is spoken, it is also referred to in Spanish as "náhuat" (not as "pipil"). In Spanish it used to be called "nahuate", a hispanicized form of the name like "tomate", but that form is obsolescent and rarely if ever heard these days; instead, it is called, as I have said, "náhuat".
Only outsiders and in particular foreign scholars have taken to calling it "Pipil", after the designation of the people (although "Pipil" as an ethnonym is probably an exonym, and the "Pipils" are not in the habit of using it much either, but that's another can or worms. The reason for the preference for some such scholars of "Pipil" over "Nawat" (for the language) is no doubt to differentiate it clearly from Nahuatl. It is perhaps only natural that the speakers of the language themselves consider that less of an issue (they know who they are!), but in any case the fact is that for them the language already has a name, namely Nawat. So, the phrasing "which happens to have its own name" begs that question, whether on purpose or unwittingly.
As for whether Nawat/Pipil is a language in its own right or "a Nahuatl dialect", that is a question which I would consider open to debate - and within that debate, I have my own reasoned position on it, while recognising the right of others to have theirs. Linguists know that it is often by no means a cut-and-dried matter whether speech varieties are best considered dialects of "the same language" or not, and this is, in that sense, one of those cases. Hence my objection to the wording "Nahuatl dialect which happens to..." which blithely begs that question too. I think of Nawat as a language, not as a dialect-of, but that is not the point I wish to make; the point I wish to make is that this point of view is one legitimate way of understanding what it is, and the wording quoted seems to want to make that viewpoint illegitimate.
In short, I could have said nothing and just edit the sentence in question and just go ahead and put this in its place: "A different (though related) language spoken in El Salvador is also called Nawat...", and that would be at least as correct as: "Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name, is spoken as far south as El Salvador". We could even have a reversion war over it. But I don't want that; what I'm asking for is some balance, i.e. not making something sound like an airtight fact when it is only one way of looking at things. -- A R King ( talk) 19:41, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for coming back and for the revision in the article. I have made two changes: to correct "southern most" to "southernmost" (orthographic), and "as far south as El Salvador" -> "in El Salvador", partly for style (to avoid "southernmost...as far south"), and because the sentence is in the present tense, and at present El Salvador is the only place Nawat/Pipil is spoken anyway, so I think that makes it clearer. Alan -- A R King ( talk) 20:56, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
I want to include a text sample and preferably also a sound sample of Nahuatl. If anyone has an idea of which text to use that would be good. I would like to have a short text that could be shown side by side in two or more dialects to illustrate the diversity. Also if anyone knows of a short sample recording of a Nahuatl native speaker (with free license) that would be good - I would prefer a recording that has already been released into the public domain. But if all else fails I'll use one of my own recordings. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 07:40, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Since I was asked by Maunus to review this article since I had worked a bit on Aztec cuisine and was at least a bit familiar with Aztec customs, I have one rather specific request. In the example of parallellisms, I'd love to see how maize was called "our flesh, our bones", since I recall reading that in Sophie D. Coe's book America's First Cuisines. Since maize was so central to Aztec mythology and society, I think it could very well replace "the chest, the box"
Peter Isotalo 14:01, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I've rather belatedly arrived to look at this article, after a request for review. I just want to endorse the GA decision. I concur on almost every point. My only disagreement is that I'm more lenient regarding whatever copyedit issues may have been in the mind of the editor who passed the article for GA. I've read a good proportion of the article at this stage. While it's style is not my own, I find it very pleasing indeed. In particular, vocabulary selection is clearly governed by the needs of a wide readership -- technical terms are used where, and only where, these are essential to description of the language. They are wikified so novices can learn their meaning, rather than creating digressions to explain what more experienced linguists are already familiar with. This is no mean feat, and a great credit to the editors who have compiled the article.
I am particularly pleased with the references. These appear to be the core standard reference works on the subject. As with technical vocabulary, selection of references shows a wise judgement on the part of the author(s) as to just how much detail should be provided.
I am thrilled to learn a little about the tl phoneme, as my naive impression of meso-american languages was that they were full of this distinctive sound. There are a couple of brief discussions of debate in the literature regarding this, and the most helpful reference is identified. Perhaps I will locate this reference at some time when I have liesure. It is a wonderful thing that Wiki provides a platform for experts to direct amateurs like me to the best sources to inform my curiosity.
I will close by repeating my praise of the quality of prose in this entry. The logical flow between and within sections, the steady cadence of simple sentences with supporting subordinate clauses and, above all, the user-friendly vocabulary choice make this a very readable article. If a reader has sufficient interest in the topic to engage, she will not find herself put off by the style of its prose.
I will keep reading, for the sake of my own education, and copyedit where I think appropriate. However, I think this article is so good already that it needs the FA process for possible further improvement. Only by explicitly hearing the competing demands of many fussy readers can we really know how to modify what has been contributed to satisfy the highest possible standards available to Wiki. Alastair Haines ( talk) 01:09, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
I tried to move the infobox reference to the list of ISO codes into iso3 (=ISO 639-3). Those are not the iso2 (ISO 639-2) codes, as the pre-current version made it seem. I tried various configurations, and finally saved one of the more innocuous-looking ones. I have no idea *why* it insists on generating two references to the list where I only put one. I'd be delighted if somebody could fix it. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 15:27, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
Excellent solution. Thanks! -- Lavintzin ( talk) 21:34, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
-My changes to your changes-
(to Lavintzin:) I have recently undone or changed a few of your edits to Nahuatl and I feel I should explain my reasons for doing so. You changed the gloss to an example of a Nahuatl sentence with agreement markers to four participants - you correctly stated that te:- and tla- are non specific prefixes referring to "someone" and "something" and not to "him" and "it" as the gloss staed. The gloss however were from Suárez' book "The Mesoamerican Indian Languages" and I believe he used the gloss he did in order to show the possibilities for polypersonal headmarking in Nahuatl. While your gloss is undoubtedly more correct I feel that we should use the gloss used in the example so as not to be guilty of neither misrepresenting quotes or doing Original Research. Your other change introduced a very good and thorough explanation of the gloss of an example of a modern Nahuatl sentence that had various loaned words. However it was a bit too detailed for the scope of the section and I moved it into a footnote. I hope that you can agree with my reasoning for changing your edits, and if not I am quite ready to discuss how to do it in a better way. I hope I haven't discouraged you from adding any more of your high quality contributions to the article. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 15:26, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't like calling things like -pan relational nouns. What's nominal about them?
They have been called postpositions by many people, and that makes sense: they are like prepositions except they come after their object. Some only occur with pronominal objects (and may optionally have a noun or independent pronoun corresponding to that object fore or aft: there is no reason beyond a priori fiat to say that the overt prefixal object is just an inflected copy of a "real" phrasal object.) Other postpositions only occur with nominal stems as objects (the "locatives" as they are often called), and yet others can occur with either type of object. fwiw the name "relational noun" is also used by some to talk about nouns like father or aunt or lid (clearly nouns, but equally clearly denoting a prominent, defining relation to the designated thing).
Many postpositions are built of a noun along with a postposition or two (e.g. -kua-pa-k 'head-on-loc' 'on top of'. But so are many prepositions in other languages (e.g. on top of, be-side, under-neath, etc.) and we don't feel the need to call those relational nouns.
Languages like Mixtec that actually use an underived noun for this sort of purpose have more reason to adopt the term. E.g. they might say 'it happened eye me' for 'in my presence', but in Nahuatl you say -īx-pan, not just -īx.
Bottom line, I know people call these things by the name "relational nouns", but I would rather the Wiki article on Nahuatl not make it seem like that's the standard or maybe even the only way they're talked about.
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 00:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
- The pronominal postpositional objects are formally identical to possessives, yes. But their meaning is not the same as possessive prefixes' meanings generally are. (That's not a strong argument as stated, but it can easily be made stronger.) What other nominal morphology do the postp/rel-n's have? Not absolutive. (Of course they don’t when they have a pronominal prefix, assuming that's a possessive prefix. But they also don't have it when the object is a noun stem, even though N-N-abs is perfectly standard. If you say those nouns are possessors, then why don't real nouns take such possessors?) No plurals, possessed or otherwise. No collectives. Dim/honorific, but often in the wrong place: _before_ the postposition. And of course verbs take the dim-hon also. Nothing else particularly nouny that I can think of.
I wonder how secure the nominal etymologies of most of them are. But that's a side issue, really.
Anyhow, as you say, there are divergent interpretations. So I agree, this should be mentioned in the article. I'm not asking to exclude the idea that they are/might be nouns of some sort. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 07:01, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
That's not a very strong argument. In at least some variants the same could be said of verbs and their clausal objects. It's easy enough to see it as a general rule that nominals corresponding to a pronominal object or possessor come next to the word in which that pronominal form occurs, except in a few special cases, and may occur either before or after (depending on the variant)... What noun did -ka come from? What did it mean? What noun did -wan come from? Anyway, the whole way of looking at it raises more questions than it provides answers. To my mind the only question it answers is "Why do the pronominal OP's have the same form as the pronominal possessors?" And I can answer that question without having to posit that the P's are nouns.
Probably this discussion is getting less relevant to the Nahuatl page. If we want to continue it one of our talk pages might be better.
Cheers!-- Lavintzin ( talk) 14:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm changing a bunch of things in the noun article, including putting a separate section for pronouns and moving the inclusive/exclusive stuff there.
One thing I'm deleting for the present at least is the following:
Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects also use a special locative suffix [1] which can be described as a locative case.
What special locative suffix is this? How is it different from the other ones? If this is to go back in, I think it needs to be clearer.
In any case the tie-in between these structures and case markings is not close (though it is real. So is the tie-in between say English prepositional phrases and case markings.) One normally expects case markings to distinguish subjects and objects, not things like "in place of" from "between" or "underneath". To me it makes sense to downplay the identification of these constructions with case.
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 14:40, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
It's in the modern variants I know too. But I don't see it as all that different from -pan, -kan, -tlan, etc. They all mean more or less "(at the) place of __", and little else. Cases like -nawak, -tzallan, -kuapak, -tenko, -ixpan add a little more information about the kind of place, by including a noun giving a good hint to that information. Anyway, I should read what Launey says about why he thinks it's so different in Classical. It is one of the few that only goes on noun stems, not permitting the pronominal prefixes to be used. -tlan is similar in some dialects at least.
Anyhow, I agree not to put it in unless there is considerably more explanation as to what Launey is proposing and why. It's probably not best to do that for a general article such as this. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 23:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
predicate
hidalgo
Randomblue (
talk)
10:53, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
In the "Modern period" section, in the map Image:Nahuatl dialects map.png the whole Sierra de Zongolica area in Central Veracruz is omitted. There is a big white blob in northern Oaxaca, and there are indeed a few Nahuatl-speaking towns there, but the Zongolica area is very large and populous in comparison. (I have a map made from the INALI map of the area that I could send whoever (Maunus, I suppose?) "owns" this map, so it could be adapted.)
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 17:20, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
I feel the small paragraph there and example could use tweaking. The example is a bit atypical, given that the -tsinoa suffix is used only of verb whose normal construction is reflexive: the normal honorific is a form (usually a reflexive) where the subject is "doubled". Circeus ( talk) 16:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
is putting .ogg media files for the pronuciation of native terms something that's encouraged for every article? or only for difficultly-spelled names? CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 01:08, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Oh my! A front page article which is manifestly wrong just by clicking on the links in the first paragraph? Why on earth does it say that all Uto-Aztecan languages are native to Mesoamerica? --
Aaron Walden
21:46, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
The article, as implemented, addresses two separate topics, the nahuan family of languages, and central Mexican Nahuatl. I'd like to suggest that these need to be split into separate articles, and that the Nahuan family info needs to be significantly enhanced, with links to articles on the family members. As it stands, the classical nahuatl info is fantastic, but I'm left wondering about all the other nahuan dialects, how they're related, when they split, etc. Don't get me started on Pipil...It would be nice to see more from the linguists about the other family members, and I think that entails splitting the article. Rsheptak ( talk) 18:15, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I was off the Internet for a few days and (bummer!) missed seeing Nahuatl on the front page on the 13th. Anyway, congratulations to us all, and especially to you, Maunus. I hope somebody who knows how to handle the barnstar thing gives you a couple! You done good. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 05:45, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
When discussing the arising of a language area, the word "converge" is an overstatement. A relatively small number of traits diffuse to the languages in the area -- that does not amount to "convergence" of the languages.
The standard citation punctuation is YYYY:[page numbers]. This is not only standard (particularly in linguistics), but it is obviously shorter than YYYY, pp. [page numbers]. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:40, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I am not against changing the citation style- but I suggest we hear other editors about it first since the article has been subject to extensive review already and this citation style was kept throughout. ·Maunus·ƛ· 09:01, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I notice instantly subtle errors of lexical collocation and use of commas that give away that this prose was largely composed by a nonnative. I will do what I can to rectify this.
To change the subject, some of the phrasings are tortuous and/or logically ill formed (like the sentence on Pipil arising from migrants to Central America which I have already edited, just minutes ago), so those interested in this article should rectify them too. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:48, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I am astonished at the consistent use of redundant indications in the citations, like "see", "consult", "for discussion of". Granted, this was once common practice in U.S. academic literature -- decades ago. Dale Chock ( talk) 07:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the article up till now misrepresented the scholarship as to the use of "Aztecan" for the name of a branch of Uto-Aztecan. Although I recognize that "Aztecan" is increasingly being replaced by "Nahuan", including by Campbell in his authoritative American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, the article doesn't demonstrate that the replacement is well established. I am not taking sides, I'm just addressing the matter of guiding people's research. You're supposed to give researchers a hint as to what terminology is the most prevalent. When they search literature from before the year 1990 at least, they're going to encounter "Aztecan".
If somebody wants to restore the use of the term "Nahuan", I'm pretty open to it -- especially if you defend within the article that "Aztecan" is rapidly being abandoned. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Two leading specialists, Langacker and Campbell, proposed in 1978 that Pochutec was not a variety of "Nahuatl", but rather a sister language to Nahuatl's ancestor. This proposal has gained acceptance over the ensuing three decades -- but the article gave no acknowledgement of this! Instead it presented that Pochutec was a variety of Nahuatl -- which ignores the stance of two of the references, Macri and Looper 2003 and Campbell and Langacker 1978a. I have inserted the appropriate mention, then correspondingly deleted all statements that identify Pochutec as falling under Proto-Nahuatl. By the way, speaking of "1978a", you're supposed to cite articles that form a series separately, not just give a single citation for the series. I'm about to correct that too. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
revert; pochutec is nahuan according to canger and lastra which are more authoritative and recent than campbell and looper macri on the internal classification of nahuan.
The crucial difference between Whorf, Lastra, and Campbell and Langacker on the one hand and Hasler on the other resides in their view on Pochutec: the former treat it as a separate branch coordinate with some dialect or stage from which all the other Nahuatl dialects have developed.
Campbell and Langacker's study contains two points of importance for the classification of Nahuatl dialects-the first concerning the position of Pochutec and the second treating the history of A in Nahuatl. Actually, most scholars have agreed that Pochutec constitutes a separate branch of Proto-Aztecan coordinate with a second branch from which all other Nahuatl dialects have developed, but Campbell and Langacker are the first to have presented detailed and systematic arguments in favor of this position of Pochutec. Dakin has since argued against their most important claims, namely, [their reconstruction of the Proto-Aztecan vowel phoneme inventory -- Dale] . . . . However, she agrees with them that "Pochutec in all respects is still an extremely divergent dialect and probably should be separated from the rest of Aztecan as Campbell and Langacker have done" (1983:202).
. . . . In other words, so far the only hypothesis based on Pochutec evidence that has received wide acceptance is that Pochutec "is parallel to all the other Aztec dialects and languages as can be shown in a branching diagram" (Campbell and Langacker 1978:98).
This is a rebuttal of CJLL Wright's (or cjllw) first set of comments -- especially the factual claims -- from 31 Dec. 2008, 16:23. I proceed in Wright's sequential order.
1. "not to launch into a series of major changes". There were no major changes. CJLL in leaping to the defense of a longtime collaborator perhaps has not read my edits so as to judge for himself whether the changes were major. The only significant content edit I made was one whose significance was minor. Namely, I made explicit the existence of a certain proposal on the relation of Pochutec with Nahuan (Aztecan) and I made it explicit that the question is to be regarded as open. (I will quote this edit below.)
2. Words by CJLL to the effect that Dale should bear in mind that Maunus is not the writer of everything Dale is criticizing. CJLL is in effect misquoting me (although his allegation is in the form of an insinuation).
a. In creating each of four new headings, I have not mentioned anyone's name. I have only stated Maunus' name when addressing his edit summaries and Talk page remarks. So it is not I who is carelessly attributing material to editor X when I reply to X, it is CJLL who carelessly assumes that everything I say while replying to X addresses X specifically. Read my words, not just the words of your buddies, longtime collaborators X, Y, and Z.
b. I had already realized that there must be multiple editors of this article for whom English is a second language.
3. "Maunus quite politely and reasonably asked". Please look at the contrast between the mildness and reasonableness of my little one sentence edit about Pochutec versus how Maunus abruptly -- and inaccurately -- dismissed the position contrary to his as a "fringe viewpoint". Maunus's hostility to acknowledging a certain proposal about one language (Pochutec) is way out of proportion to the intrinsic importance of the subject (aside from being academically improper).
4. "I do not see anywhere where Maunus has said the Pochutec matter is "100% proven". Well, in that case let me summarize what I have already written here.
a. About the Pochutec question, I added the following to the article: "The proposal of Campbell and Langacker in the 1970s that Pochutec -- a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century -- is coordinate with all other Aztecan dialects (that it was the first to split off from Proto-Aztecan) has gained currency. [2]". Does anyone still fault either the academic neutrality or the tone of this?
b. Maunus deleted the above (go here to compare the versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Nahuatl&diff=260893271&oldid=260874326) with the justification that it's a "fringe viewpoint" (he wrote that 15:48, 30 December 2008 under this same Talk page heading, "Pochutec"). But as I have explained on this Talk page, it is instead closer to being the mainstream position.
c. Maunus defended his claim in part by citing (but not quoting from) Canger 1988 but -- again as I have elaborated on -- Canger 1988 contradicts Maunus.
d. Here's new information bearing on the "fringe viewpoint" accusation: Suarez 1983 also accepts the allegedly "fringe" proposal ("the historically attested Nahua language group and its closest relative Pochutec" -- i.e., Po is a relative of Na, not a variety of Na). Even better: Suarez wrote this in the very next sentence after a claim that appears in the article's lead ("Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD."); see Suarez 1983:149 (original hardbound edition, five pages into §10.1). Granted Maunus may not be the one who put that in the lead, but as CJLL asserts, Maunus has been "the mainstay contributor" of this Nahuatl article (an assumption I had not made myself). Not only that, but Maunus with all his specialist training (see his personal page) would know Suarez 1983 well -- it's a survey of the languages of that part of the world published by an old linguist writing about his area of expertise, and Suarez 1983 is in the bibliography. J.A. Suarez, Canger, Campbell, Langacker -- this is not a grouping that generates "fringe" proposals about Nahuatl or the Nahuan branch! (Campbell and Langacker are the originators of the proposal Maunus doesn't want to see mentioned in the article, while Suarez and Canger have repeated the proposal unskeptically.)
5. Here's what I have to say in defense of my belittling tone.
a. The prose is pretty bad in places and there are howler inaccuracies -- months after the article attains Featured status. CJLL complains about newcomer me barging in on a longtime group -- then why didn't you collectively catch these flaws yourselves over so many years?
b. Maunus's rebuttals were careless. He has confused "Nahuan" with "Nahuatl" at least twice (a distinction he obviously understands, but he slips up anyway); to repeat, a paper he claimed supported his opinion actually contradicted it. Maunus still hasn't quoted from the one scholar left among his citations who might support his position (I refer to Y. Lastra de Suarez, not to be confused with J.A. Suarez).
c. The footnote formatting is so naive it really should be beneath the dignity of people with master's degrees.
In conclusion, one can readily see why I would feel that the gist of CJLL's intervention was to dwell only on sensational aspects of some (some) of my remarks (the part CJLL was not too busy to read) and ignore every substantive thing I had written in the preceding 24 hours or so. Dale Chock ( talk) 00:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Under this major heading, yesterday, Maunus asserted that classifying Pochutec outside of Nahuatl is a "fringe viewpoint". I have already rebutted that statement, but the story of the rebuttal gets better and better. I just read the article General Aztec. Two and a half years ago, an editor who is a current and longtime contributor to both that article and this one (and who is a "practicing linguist" to boot) made this edit to General Aztec:
All these dialectal areas constitute what may be called General Aztec or Nahuatl proper: it is generally accepted that Pochutec (now extinct) is different enough from all of these to warrant being counted as a sister Nahuan language to General Aztec.
This entire sentence survives in that article as the concluding sentence of its lead. Well, that is the viewpoint that Maunus condemns as "fringe", and deleted my modestly phrased edit on Pochutec to this article. Well, Maunus is another current and longtime contributor to that article too. Yet the Talk page of General Aztec contains no discussion of this issue, the relation of Pochutec within the Nahuan branch (also called the Aztecan branch). Dale Chock ( talk) 02:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
I reacted somewhat brusquely because you were introducing substantial changes to a long stable high quality article without discussion but with a lot of disparaging and actually quite offensive, arrogant remarks. My reversal of your edit was not a rejection of its factauality but a request for discussion and consenus before making substantial changes. You should know that I am not the only lingiuist working proifessionally with uto-aztecan language who has contributed substantially to this article otrhers include User:Lavintzin, User:Taivo and User:AlanRKing and when I asked for you to wait it was their thoughts I was hoping to hear on the issue. However I don't get a feeling that you are intrerested in colaboration , and I also have to say that I dont really feel like collaborating with someone displaying your arrogant attitude. So for now do what you want with the articles, I have neither the time, internet acces, or book resources to argue with you. For what its worth I admit that I was wrong about Pochutec (I reacted to quick)- which is a sister to the nahuan group of the aztecan languages. That is not fringe. I was thinking about Pipil/Nawat that was also classified as a branch unto itself by Campbell but included in peripheral dialects by Lastra/Canger (I thought about this because it is a discussion we have had here before). Macri and Looper however is not a good resource for genetic relationships since their agenda is strictly to prove that nahuat was spoken in mesoamerica in the classic period (which IS a fringe viewpoint) - use references dealing with uto-aztecan genealogy for claims about genealogy. Go ahead & happy editing. ·Maunus·ƛ· 16:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
In reviewing this article over the last 18 hours or so, I have seen that the formatting of citations is incorrect and unsophisticated. But to discuss corrections to footnotes turns out to beg a question: what is the proper genre for this entry, and for WP entries generally? Editors have been composing this article not like an encyclopedia entry, but like a scholarly monograph. Of course, the same is true of many WP entries. An encyclopedia entry would be more impersonal (i.e., have fewer overt mentions of scholars' names) and it would summarize more. So I see the need to question how much we want to let this trend continue at Wikipedia.
It's not clear to me that we would want to reverse this trend:
But for now, I suggest to past editors of this article that it is now bogged down in details and that the style should be less of a review article and more of a summary -- like you'd find in encyclopedias, including encyclopedias of linguistics. (The entries in encyclopedias for academicians do, of course, contain mentions of scholars' names in the body of the entry, but sparingly.)
I will conclude with miscellaneous tutorial remarks on footnotes.
[1] As to the cumbersomeness I have objected to, I realize that it is still in vogue in some fields of academia (I have philosophy journals in mind). However, streamlined footnotes are quite common and are predominant in linguistics, and not just in linguistics. I find it ironic that we have an editor who disregarded the formatting used in one of the papers he has had the greatest confidence in (Canger 1988 in IJAL). Incidentally, I see that IJAL's current style requirements have a slight change: use a comma to separate the author name and the year. I don't see a virtue in this, but it doesn't bother me terribly, either.
[2] I can't believe people could spend days and weeks reading through academic monographs and not notice footnotes like "Smith 1995a", "Smith 1995b" (especially when the footnotes are literally not foot notes, but are embedded in the text). This is what academics do when they cite multiple works by the same worker from the same year. In the case of this entry on Nahuatl, it's cleaner to cite "Campbell and Langacker 1978b:83" than "Campbell and Langacker 1978 (Part II:83)". Besides, the multiple works rarely form a thematic series (as they did in this case). And what if some of the multiple works formed a thematic series and others didn't? Dale Chock ( talk) 03:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been able to get hands on some of my materials that I have not had acces to since Dale Chock drastically altered the classification scheme for Pochutec and Nahuan in general based on his understanding of Canger, Lastra, Campbell & Langacker and Dakin. It seems that his interpretation is at odds at least with that of Dakin who wrote in 2001 in the article "Estudios sobre el náhuatl" in Avances y balances de lenguas yutoaztecas, (Published by Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia ISBN: 970-18-6966-4.) (This book was published exactly as a statement of the current status of Uto-Aztecan studies and contains contributions from most of the premier scholars in the field):
Dakin then proceeds to draw up a classification scheme that she states follows the classifications of Lastra and Canger that counts Pipil among the eastern dialects and Pochutec among the western dialects. This seems to mean either that Karen Dakin suffers from the same misunderstandings of the classification of nahuan languages that yours truly did until Dale chock came around and corrected it or that in fact the page previously reflected the scholarly consensus better when it classified Pochutec as a Nahuan language classifiable with dialects of the the western periphery. Furthermore Dakin directly contradicts Dale chocks notion that Canger and Lastras classification of a centre and eastern/western peripheries is not historically based and explains the exact nature of the historical relationship citing the same papers that I have cited and which Dale Chock has cited to the opposite effect. think it is time to bring back the classification scheme that was in place before Dale Chock appeared out of nowehere with his novel interpretations of old data. ·Maunus·ƛ· 18:31, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
I was going to put somthing into the article about how in prisons some/many of the Mexican gang members are learning Nahuatl language. I have no source for this information besides blog posts. Is there anyone who can find verification for this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.85.234.27 ( talk) 01:52, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I saw something about it on a History Channel show on Mexican gangs...but I'm unable to find anything right now. Batteryram ( talk) 19:23, 2 October 2010 (UTC)Batteryram
There is no need for a hatnote reference to the reggae DJ Rudy Grant, one of whos stage names is "the mexicano". If any redirect to him is necessary it will be from a disambiguation page at Mexicano redirecting simulataneously to Rudy Grant, Nahuatl and all other possible uses of the word Mexicano. There is no justiofication for marring and FA with a reference to an ubscure Dj with a marginally similar nickname. ·Maunus·ƛ· 16:56, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Were there ever any radio stations with programs in the Nahuatl language? Dexter Nextnumber ( talk) 22:28, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Is Tla from Tla as in Something or from the root word meaning to speak.
Nahuatl would be the next word. is it used as in language or as in to speak.
Where is til from?
I'm completely lost on Panoloani? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.15.116.90 ( talk) 15:41, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
An anonymous editor is changing the phonology table to present the phonology of the dialect of MEcayapan. This is a bad idea for several reasons. The mecayapan dialect is just one dialect of many and there is no reason to privilege it over other dialects - some of which have many more speakers. This issue is avoided by choosing an historical dialect. Secondly the mecayapan dialect is not very representive it has undergone many changes that are particular to it and are not found in any other dialects. The choice of Classical Nahuatl also avoids this problem as it has a phonology that is quite similar to a majority of modern dialects (except a majority of modern dialects have h instead of glottal stop) - and many of the modern dialects that are not similar to classical nahuatl have evolved from stage where they were similar within the past centuries. Thirdly the rest of the article uses Classical Nahuatl phonology as a reference for description of the particular phonologies of other dialects - this means that we can not just change the phonology table without changing the entire article's prose to reflect that change. ·Maunus·ƛ· 19:53, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
When you go to this page, it says "'Mexican language' redirects here." That's not true; "Mexican language" redirects to "Languages of Mexico." Should the {redirect} be removed from this page, or should "Mexican language" be changed to redirect to "Nahuatl"? Zaxius ( talk) 21:26, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
The way some parts of the article are phrased now is advertedly or inadvertedly discriminatory. When the article says that nahuatl "is a group of related languages and dialects", it is giving inaccurate information and being unadvertedly racist. If we were to say that Nahuatl is a group of dialects, then we would have to say the same thing for ALL languages. A dialect is but the regional variety of a language. In that sense ALL human beings who speak a language, speak a dialect. There is nobody who speaks only a language and speaks no dialect. Having said that, why is it deemed important to point out that NAHUATL IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, and not say the same thing for every other language e.g. ENGLISH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, SPANISH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, FRENCH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, etc. The reason might be because there is a colonial tradition of making a distinction between (civilized) languages and (primitive) dialects -the parentheses here are meant to point out the underlying belief behind. Spanish or English, for example, have a really big dialectal variability, and a person from Cuba might really not be understood by someone in Argentina, or someone from a peasant community in Guerrero, México might not be understood at all by a Spaniard. The speech of someone speaking "English" in Jamaica is really far away from the speech of a Texan or a middle class student in Vancouver... Like I said, there is really no objectivity in saying that "Náhuatl is a group of dialects".
Now... having said that. I also don't know why would it be written here that Nahuatl is a group of related "LANGUAGES". Nahuatl IS A LANGUAGE, not a group of LANGUAGES. The linguistic family from which nahuatl comes is called Yutonahuatl, or Yuto-Aztecan. This latter indeed can be said to be "a group of languages", which includes "Cora" "Huichol" and many other North American languages. But NAHUATL IS NOT A GROUP OF LANGUAGES. A nahuatl speaker in Guerrerro understands and communicates with a nahuatl speaker in Veracruz or Puebla. Yes... with some difficulty, depending on the level of variation, but the language is only one (just like in the examples I gave earlier about English or Spanish). There is literature being produced, music, grammar analyses, symposiums, etc., in and about the Nahuatl language. There is really no basis for saying that Nahuatl is a group of related languages; if anything, one could stretch it and argue that this issue is not yet resolved, and that is being still debated by linguistics, but in that case, the vast consensus is that NAHUATL is A LANGUAGE, not a dialect, not a group of dialects, not a group of languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.156.20.98 ( talk) 02:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
This article is a total mess with regards to the language/dialect issue. Obviously, the division between these terms is often more political than linguistic, but many people seem to agree that a good metric is mutual intelligibility, which would dictate that Nahuatl is a family of at least a handful of languages, rather than a single language.
At least let's make up our minds... there are lines of this article that talk about Nahuatl dialects, Nahuan languages, and Nahuan varieties all referring to the same thing. Parts of this article claim that Pipil is a dialect of the Nahuatl language, while others claim that Pipil is a language in the Nahuan language family.
To the commenter above: when we start having to write separate books for English vs Australian English, or Cuban vs Mexican Spanish, then you can compare the Nahuatl situation... you do realize that speakers from La Huasteca region cannot understand written (or spoken) materials prepared in the Nahuatl variety Guerrero, and vice-versa (the two most spoken varieties, I believe)? Literate Spanish speakers can understand almost any modern text written in another Spanish-speaking country. The difference between some Nahuatl varieties is more akin to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, maybe even Spanish and Italian - you can definitely recognize a lot of words, and maybe know what general topic is being discussed, but without learning the other variety, you can't actually know what people are saying.
Also, this has to be the only language article on Wikipedia that flips back and forth between referring to a classical language and its modern descendants, often without clarifying which is being discussed...
The reason I bring all this up here rather than just changing it myself is that I think we should discuss the options. Should some material be moved to Classical Nahuatl? Should we refer to Nahuatl varieties as languages? How can we continue to refer to them as "dialects", when plenty of reliable sources treat them as separate languages, and they are mutually unintelligible?
-- ಠ_ಠ node.ue ಠ_ಠ ( talk) 08:42, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I really found the External Link section of the article to be very helpful in allowing me to become very familiar with the morphology of the Nahualt language. My instructor for my linguistics class gave us a variety of links to help us become familiar with different american indian languages. I came across a great page that is perfect for introductory students such as myself and I would like to know if anyone believes a link should be added to the External Link section that will redirect someone to the following page, http://www.native-languages.org/nahuatl.htm. I believe this page would be a great asset to this section because the site has wonderful example of vocabulary and literature. The website also has links to many dictionaries, audiotapes and language resources. Please let me know what you think. Lasotelo101 ( talk) 04:38, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
I removed the following external links from the section, so that we might have a discussion about which links to include and which not. WP:EL is quite specific to avoid link farms with links that are not specifically helpful to reader, so let us have a discussion about this.
I've just revamped the refs, changing to harvard refs and introducing some new ones. I also reorganized the article to keep internal and external classification together and avoid repetition and redundancy. I want to make sure the references are up to date, but I am wondering if the article text itself may need an update to become more useful. Any opinions about how the grammar section may be improved? As Node ue ( talk · contribs) pointed out above the article is a hub for articles about the different varieties and we need to strike a balance between demonstrating the fact of diversity and give coherent information. Input and suggestions are invited. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:04, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi, We have this issue that we really do not know how to deal with and were hoping an expert could come help us on our quest for truth.
/info/en/?search=Talk:Marijuana_(word)#Nahuatl_Clarification
Thank you -- Potguru ( talk) 02:53, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
Lacrimosus ( talk · contribs): 1. Whether or not it is an adverb or a noun as in English is irrelevant - translation of does not require the translation to use the same wordclass. 2. the translation given of mexicacopa clearly translates it as an adverbial phrase, so the reader is not mislead to believe that it is a noun. 3. I know of no instances of mexicatlahtolli being used to describe the language in colonial Nahuatl - if anything it was called Nahuatlahtolli. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:30, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
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I fixed an error in the article GlottalStop777 ( talk) 14:36, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
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targetsThere are many harv citation target warnings remaining in the featured article. I corrected a few errors in the sources and a corresponding sfn. More await attention. I am available sporadically and will certainly return. It’d be great if an interested editor beat me to it. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 03:17, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Hello everyone,
Just FYI, I will be making a recording of this article for the Spoken Articles project and will upload it soon.
Regards, Nelson (Jarabe tapatio)
Only Sahagún is mentioned as an author, but we know the names of other authors: Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, and Mateo Severino. - Francis Tyers · 23:10, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
On this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl The video: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/WIKITONGUES-_Javier_speaking_Nahuatl_%26_Spanish.webm First of all, Nahuatl is a second language to me.The person "Javier" is not speaking nahuatl. He is not a speaker of the language. He is an "Aztec Dancer". Notice the necklace and ear gauges which are not Nahua. His chant is not in Nahuatl but rather is from the Native American church from the USA. He then sings in spanish while mixing in some very commonly known nahuatl words that everyone knows in Mexico but are no longer indigenous concepts but recreating Aztec stereotypes by city people. You can find hundreds of videos of actual native people that speak Nahuatl as their native language or even students and professors who speak it as a second language. This video does not show a person speaking Nahuatl. It would be like a video showing a person doing a buddist chant then singing in Chinese and mixing common words in english like "House", "Family", and "Jesus Christ". Then you'd put "here is a person speaking english!" I hope you understand what I'm saying and remove the video because it's mislabeled and wrong. Thank you. Aztlanow ( talk) 19:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
Having another look at this article my attention was caught by the Language Prehistory subsection. I notice that it only refers to, and draws information from, T. Kaufman's article. Having read that article, I was wondering just how reliable its conclusions are. Please note that I am not asking this as a way of attacking the article or its author. I am not a specialist on the history of Nahuatl and I lack sufficient criteria to take a stand myself. Perhaps my question would be better worded as: "What is the standing of this article (which is now quite old, so it must have one) according to current academic opinion in the field?" (By the way, although the Wikipedia article refers to it as K's 2001 article, the latter is based on his work from as early as 1989, and 2001 only being the latest of several revision dates given given at the beginning of the text.) I cannot evaluate the data in the article, except to say that it looks interesting, but as a "lay" reader, the assertions in the article about the prehistory of Nahuatl strike me as being built on a rather longish chain of mutually dependent, unproven conjectures, which is not a crime either, but in contrast with the apparently spectulative nature of that content, I find the tone of the article unexpectedly self-confident. Also not a crime, but if I am right about all these assessments, then the conclusion would be that although Kaufman says A = B, Wikipedia may be better off leaving it as "it has been suggested that A = B". Which it does, I admit, but I was wondering if either (a) the hypotheses mentioned are backed by other scholars (and we could then say so in our article) or (b) there are alternative viewpoints which might be added, so that this section does not hang on the conjectures of one scholar. Any thoughts from those of you who know your way around this subject better than I? Please do correct/educate me if I'm just wrong to think this!
Also: shouldn't the article by Kaufman be listed in the bibliography as well as referenced in the notes? -- A R King 11:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. I was just wondering, mainly, and also curious to know what somebody knowledgeble as you are actually thought about this. I don't know as much as you about Terence Kaufman, although I'm familiar with Campbell, Kaufman & Smith-Stark, "Meso-American as a Linguistic Area" in Language 62:3, 1986, pp. 530-570 which I have consulted many times. Maybe Kaufman is the kind of writer who is so very knowledgeable that he tends to make leaps that make perfect sense to him but leave some humbler readers behind who can't keep up with him because we simply lack access to (or the capacity to process?) the immense data feed that is actually sustaining his thesis. If so, that doesn't make him wrong, it just makes the rest of us bewildered! I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt (perhaps he deserves it), but as they stand on the page, sometimes one seems to be asked to take too much on faith. For example, on purely linguistic grounds and with the data that he supplies, I feel he is running too fast in his conclusions about which morphological affixes in historically attested Nahuatl "must" have developed from clitics. I am perfectly willing to concede that they may come from clitics, but how it is that he knows they do escapes me, as I seem to be able to imagine other possible explanations - perhaps through sheer ignorance on my part, but how can I know that unless the author explains himself? So all in all I'm left wondering, on the basis of the text as such, how methodologically trustworthy his conclusions are. (I mention the clitics example because it's in an area I can at least begin to get my teeth dug into, as opposed to Krakatoa and all that, which is all Martian to me!
I do have Campbell's Pipil book, so if you need to know anything specifically just ask me. He has several pages of discussion of theories about the origins of the Pipils (as I'm sure you know). Cheers, -- A R King 15:02, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Lent is the past of lend. Except for dialectal use, I believe loan as a VERB (synonym of lend; past and participle: loaned) is a distinctive feature of US English. I have lived in both Britain and the US, but to me the use of loan as a verb just sounds/looks stylistically inappropriate in a text in "encyclopedic" register, i.e. too vernacular. In any case, loaned and lent would be synonyms. But the fact is that, if I am not mistaken, in linguistics, when talking about words from one language being adopted in another language it is not usual in English to employ either lend OR loan as a VERB, but rather borrow. Loan IS used as a noun, however. Therefore we either speak of Loan(word)s from Nahuatl in other languages or or Words borrowed from Nahuatl in other languages. -- A R King 08:32, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
What I'm saying is that "lent" and "loaned" are both grammatically correct (but of the two, "loaned" is more markedly colloquial), but that neither of these are as common in linguistic contexts as "borrowed". -- A R King 13:23, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with A R King - as far as I'm aware, "loan" is, in standard English usage, only a noun - not a verb. I see that "lent" has been changed back to "loaned" - I agree that "lend" is not commonly used in the linguistic sense. I am going to change this to "Words borrowed from Nahuatl in other languages", as A R King suggests. Aiwendil42
-- Lavintzin 04:44, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Like Lavintzin, I also declare for what it's worth that I haven't been involved in any changes in the article either.
And for what it's worth, I still think I'm right about this, based on both my general competence in English and my experience reading linguistic texts in English. Probably the most reliable way to resolve the doubt (other than just reaching a consensus here) would be through an empirical corpus survey, but to do this systematically is probably not practical or economical. We can, however, look at appropriate texts and locate examples, and I shall pull a few off the nearest bookshelf as I write. Before I start quoting, I remind you that I am suggesting that common usage in such contexts includes the following possibilities: (a) as a noun: "loan" or "loanword" (I have also come across "borrowing", actually); (b) as a verb: "borrow". As regards the verbs "lend" and "loan", I repeat that while both exist in English, "lend" is more appropriate in formal style; but I am also saying that as linguistic terms, neither of these is commonplace (but if I had to use one, it would definitely be "to lend", not "to loan").
Okay, for my random survey I have chosen the book on my shelf that looks like it's most likely to contain discussion of the concept in question and which constitutes, I think, an impeccable specimen of a "prestige linguistic textbook", and this turns out to be Historical Linguistics by Theodora Bynon, published by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series in 1977, but mine is the revised and corrected edition of 1983. The first observation is that in the book's Index, there are entries for "loan-words" (also for "loan translation") and for "borrowing", but none for "lending" or ??"loaning". I have followed up index references and quote sentences containing any of the terms relevant to this discussion, which I shall put in bold. Unfortunately time limitations have not allowed me to do this exhaustively for all the indexed references in the book, so I've just copied as many as I could in the time available.
pp. 180-1:
Conversely the Low German dialects of the north all have some words with High German consonantism, which are clearly loans. It is these loan-words from High German...
p. 217:
We are not here immediately concerned with the procedure whereby words are identified by the linguist as loans, but rather with the pehnomena associated with the transfer of lexical material across language boundaries as known from the study of loan-words after these have been established as such. We may however briefly say at this point that these words are considered to be borrowed from Latin because they are innovations in both Old English and Old High German... Their identification as loans from Latin...
p. 219:
In the case of German some of the words must have been borrowed early enough for...
same page:
...it would appear that Kitte must have been borrowed while the initial consonant was still a [k]...
and:
The reflexes... could then be accounted for in the same way as being due to borrowing at different periods...
p. 220:
...its source word must have been borrowed before this took place.
p. 221:
These changes can be explained as due to the word stress having been shifted during the borrowing process...
and:
We may therefore postulate for these loan-words...
and:
It will be seen from the above examples that where loan-words are concerned...
On the other hand, I am forced to admit (with slight embarrassment) that the book also says this (p. 217):
For our first example of "loaning", or "borrowing", we will take...
There is a footnote reference following the word "borrowing" here which discusses the practice of using these terms in linguistic texts, which makes two points: first, that neither of the words is really strictly accurate, but "these are the established terms" nevertheless; and secondly, that the term "loan-word" originated as a loan-translation from German Lehnwort. But I will still stick to my guns because I suspect that the observed usage of the author herself speaks more loudly than this metalinguistic comment with regard to the actual use or not of "loaning", which I don't believe anybody actually writes in linguistics texts, apart from this reference. But if somebody can show I'm wrong, go ahead! --
A R King
07:36, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Languages tend more to "sucking words up" than to "spitting them out".
Seems to me there's a natural semantic reason borrowing is spoken of more often than loaning in linguistic use of this (rather poor) metaphor. Speakers normally take words from other languages (or accept them under various forms of prescription) — they adopt (and sometimes adapt) them. We have no verb for widely using a lexical item of one language in some other language, but convention gives us borrow [+object] [+indirect object] — e.g. English borrowed garage from French. Semantically, French did not loan us the word, whether or not verbal usage of loan is acceptable in formal contexts or not. This is where the metaphor breaks down. Use of a word originating in a foreign language is metaphorically like using money that originates with (or continues to rightly belong to) someone else. However, this metaphor only works from the perspective of the recipient, not from that of the benefactor. I would guess the metaphor arose because of the apt way it captures the idea of "filling a gap".
I would suggest our instinctive discomfort at hearing *garage is a word loaned from French to English, or *English loaned the word garage is because verbal uses of loan still properly imply movement from benefactor to beneficiary. The technical metaphorical use in linguistics has not (yet) become so isolated from the metaphor that it can be comfortably used without the full associations of colloquial forms of the verb intruding. This is unlike say manipulating, which has technical implications in psychology, that no longer suggest to anyone anything to do with use of the hands.
It's a fascinating thought that the word borrow in this linguistic context stems from the kinship of English and German, that allows compounds like loanword to superficially resemble the agglutinated form Lehnwort. German linguistics does not speak of languages lehnen words to others do they? If German also has Lehngeld, Lehnwort means something subtly different in German lexical choice than loanword does in the context of English. Alastair Haines ( talk) 01:48, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
I've made this image trying to show the extent of nahuatl in modern and historical times - the yelow colour shows the approximate area where classical nahuatl is thought to have been used as a lingua franca or a prestige language spoken by the ruling classes. The orange area is the places where there is known to have been nahuatl speaking populations at the time of the conquest. And the red areas is where nahuatl is spoken now. The map has the drawback that it is quite impressionistic because we obviously don't know the exact boundaries of nahuatl populations or lingua franca use before the conquest. I think it illustrates well the decline of the nahuatl languages - but I am uncertain if that is enough to weigh up the probable inaccuracies. Do you think it is useful enough to warrant inclusion? Maunus 09:39, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
(Copied over from User talk:Lavintzin)
Your recent change to Nahuatl - Most populous indigenous languages
I think that your recent edit [8 Feb] although warranted because what the article was saying was untrue, obscured an important point, namely that Nahuatl, when counted as one language rather than a group of languages, is the amerindian language with most speakers along with Quechua and Guaraní. K'iche maya which is the most populous mayan language has only 1,000,000 speakers according to the figures given here - although The mayan language family has more speakers than nahuatl but it is comprised of thirty different languages (it also has more speakers than the combined speaker of Uto-Aztecan languages but that is beside the point). I hope you see my point and that you can think of a way of wording the sentence so that this point isn't lost. Basicaly I am saying that there is no need of adding "along with the mayan languages" to the phrase - but maybe the entire phrase as it is is redundant. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 21:05, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
In the article we describe nahuatl as one language with dialectal diversity - in the article on mayan languages we describe them (in accordance to the views of most Mayan peoples as expressed throuhg the ALMG) as disctinct languages. That means that the comparison of Nahuatl to Mayan is not justified by what we write in the articles. I think that maybe the most populous language comment is better left out altogether. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I suggest that the Spanish practice of moving Tlaxcaltecs to missions to help convert various peoples to Christianity resulting in spreading Nahuatl should be mentioned. I was reading tonight about Nahuatl loanwords in Coahuilteco, which is rather on the fringes of the Mesoamerican area. It's interesting that there were non-native Nahuatl bilinguals that far north. – ishwar (speak) 04:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
If dialects are mutually unintelligible, they should be considered as languages, not dialects.-- Ornitorrinco 17:00, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
There's nothing else called Nahuatl that the language would need to be disambiguated from (well, there's Nahua, but "Nahuatl" is not generally used to refer to the people in English), and it would also avoid the language/dialect issue. -- Ptcamn 16:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Could somebody please record and upload a pronunciation of "Nahuatl (['na.watɬ])" English doesn't contain the ɬ sound ( voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) and I don't think I'm the only person reading this article who is curious as to how to correctly pronounce "Nahuatl". Patiwat 18:29, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Nahuatl is the language spoken by the native people
No way zero monoglots. There are *lots* of people in a number of areas who are monolingual. Many more are able to use Spanish only for basic buying and selling, catching a bus to where they want to go, etc. -- Lavintzin 00:09, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
The full list of dialects in the infobox seems a bit excessive. Could we change this to a summary or a reference to a section in the article instead? Peter Isotalo 11:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree and have tried to change this, but somebody needs to tweak the infobox structure. It's not straightforward to change. I thought you could put in the infobox a link to the Nahuatl Dialects article. -- Lavintzin 00:09, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
What happened to the rather large discussion history of this page? ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:14, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I heard that this language will become compulsory in the curriculum starting 2008, just wondering what Nahuatl language it is? Enlil Ninlil 06:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Can we get a few sentences added on why Nahuatl /s/ is commonly spelled as z rather than s? Mind you, "Spanish" is not an explanation in itself, since they do recognize /s/ = s too. It can't be 100% random, can it? -- Tropylium 13:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Based on the current state of this article, and based on the good article criteria at this time, especially criteria 2 (b), with regards to verifiability and inline citations, this article does not appear to meet the standards of good articles. As such, a discussion has been initiated at good article reassessement to decide what can be done to bring it up to standard. Please see that page for further discussion. -- Jayron32| talk| contribs 04:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
I am beginning a major reconstruction of the Nahuatl article, the aim is to reduce redundancy, repetition and trivia while maximizing the level of information and references. I have begun with removing the overview section and in stead making the lead conform better to WP:LEAD. I have also added a history section before the Genealogy and Geography sections describing the precolumbian, colonial and modern history of the language - this goes instead of the "linguistic prehistory" section which was only based on Kaufman 2001 and which was completely incomplete. The Geography section I have provided with sources, namely a reference to the most accessible description of the Nahuatl dialect of each region. Hopefully once this work is well underway the article will deserve its GA status and then we can move on towards an FA-run. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 12:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
By what formal sense is Nahuatl identified as a "Chicano language" (Cf. the navigation template at the bottom)? Anyone else think this to be a problematic identification...?-- cjllw ʘ TALK 08:32, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
OK thx, I've removed Nahuatl from the template and the template from this article. -- cjllw ʘ TALK 00:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
"For a list of words relating to of the Nahuatl language, see the Nahuatl language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary" isn't very elegant - is there a better way to use the template to link to Wiktionary? (Found this while hunting for "to of" to correct, for WP:TYPO!). PamD ( talk) 18:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Hey, Manaus requested that I give the article a quick review to see how it is coming relative to the good article criteria with the idea of getting the article relisted. For the record, the article's prose is quite well written, and it seems to be rather comprehensive and neutral. Still, there are a few issues, mainly with referencing, that may cause a hangup with regards to a GA review:
Other than the above referencing issues, the article was very good. I enjoyed reading it, and it is quite informative without being overly technical or detailed. Fix those referencing issues, and you will most certainly have a GA on your hands. In fact, I would say that the article would be quite close to featured article status once those referencing issues are fixed. -- Jayron32. talk. contribs 14:17, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I would like the consonant and vowel tables to appear side by side rather than one above the other. How can this be done? ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 10:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Although the article currently says warning 66kb I have calculated the readable prose to be only 35kb - so there is no need to split the article yet. And by now I am just about finished. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 15:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there any environment conditioning the split? This is not mentioned here.
Or is it unknown? Or too complicated to fit within the bulleted list? If so, maybe there could be a mention in the footnote ref about why the details of this are omitted. – ishwar (speak) 17:20, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
I have a factual question about the comment at the end of the Pre-Colombian subsection, which I reproduce here:
"This group were the Mexica who during the next 300 years founded an empire based in Tenochtitlan, their island capital. Their political and linguistic influence came to reach well into Central America and it is well documented that among several non-Nahuan ethnic groups, such as the K'iche' Maya, Nahuatl became a prestige language used for long distance trade and spoken by the elite groups, and a classical language among the educated."
I understand this to be referring to the period prior to the arrival of the Spanish, and I'm curious to know how whether it is firmly established to have been so. I ask because while I'm no historian (obviously!), I thought the Spanish had been instrumental in spreading "classical" Nahuatl as a prestige lingua franca over a wide region (which would include Central America, or course). This account seems to be saying this had already happened before they came (at least as far as the parts of Central America mentioned).
So perhaps Maunus or someone can just say a few words to clarify that question more explicitly? -- A R King ( talk) 08:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
One expression of "Nahuatl as a lingua franca" that survives into present-day daily life (whether or not ordinary people are aware of it) is of course in modern place names. There are even cases such as the Guatemalan town of Quetzaltenango (a transparently Nahuatl name), in the heart of "Maya country", which is so called officially and on the maps, but which to this very day is widely referred to by the locals by the quite different Maya name of Xela. (This is so well known that the information even finds its way into tourist guide books.) I've long been curious about the details of how this happened. I used to have this image in my mind of Spanish mapmakers surveying the country in the company of their Mexican (Nahuatl-speaking) interpreters, the latter providing (from where?) Nahuatl designations of each place which were then transcribed onto the official maps and legal documents... I wonder how realistic that could be and if the answer is: Not very, then how and when all those Nahuatl place names in non-Nahuatl-speaking territories did come about. Certainly, the pre-existence of "Aztec" Nahuatl as a firmly established lingua france in the area would provide one plausible explanation. But if so, where does that leave the well-known assumption (to which I refer above) about the Spanish having been responsible for the spread of Nahuatl all over the area? -- A R King ( talk) 10:01, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
"Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua the same happened in El Salvador, Nicaragua and in Honduras where Nahuatl speakers settled in communties named Mexicapa after them."
In San Salvador the "barrio" said to have been founded by the Mexicans accompanying the Spanish is to this day known as "Mexicanos". Is this fact sufficiently significant to merit expanding the above sentence to: "...named Mexicapa or Mexicanos after them"? -- A R King ( talk) 09:05, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't know quite what to make of the wording of this sentence:
"Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name, is spoken as far south as El Salvador, by a small number of speakers."
As someone who has worked intensively on this language and written about it on Wikipedia, I try to be careful to tread carefully (even giving the benefit of the doubt against my own judgment if expedient) around issues on which scholarly and informed opinion is divided or uncommitted. Here the issues in question are: (a) whether this is a separate language or a "Nahuatl dialect", and (b) whether or not the name of the language is actually "Pipil". I am not asking to have my own opinions abided by on these things, only that other editors try to be as balanced as I am trying to be.
The words "Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name" sound like they are aimed at driving a particular point of view home - that this is "a Nahuatl dialect", not a language, and that its name is "Pipil" - much more insistently than anything said in the article about other universally recognised dialects of Nahuatl (some of which also have their own names). That pointedness is gratuitous as far as I can tell, and as such I take it as an invitation to expound my own point of view here, which differs from that expressed.
I would say (and do say so, when speaking for myself) that the real name of the language is not Pipil but Nawat. My main reason is that that is how its speakers refer to it; not a final argument (German speakers refer to their language as Deutsch, yet we still call it German in English), but a point to consider. A further point we might want to weigh up is that in El Salvador, where the language is spoken, it is also referred to in Spanish as "náhuat" (not as "pipil"). In Spanish it used to be called "nahuate", a hispanicized form of the name like "tomate", but that form is obsolescent and rarely if ever heard these days; instead, it is called, as I have said, "náhuat".
Only outsiders and in particular foreign scholars have taken to calling it "Pipil", after the designation of the people (although "Pipil" as an ethnonym is probably an exonym, and the "Pipils" are not in the habit of using it much either, but that's another can or worms. The reason for the preference for some such scholars of "Pipil" over "Nawat" (for the language) is no doubt to differentiate it clearly from Nahuatl. It is perhaps only natural that the speakers of the language themselves consider that less of an issue (they know who they are!), but in any case the fact is that for them the language already has a name, namely Nawat. So, the phrasing "which happens to have its own name" begs that question, whether on purpose or unwittingly.
As for whether Nawat/Pipil is a language in its own right or "a Nahuatl dialect", that is a question which I would consider open to debate - and within that debate, I have my own reasoned position on it, while recognising the right of others to have theirs. Linguists know that it is often by no means a cut-and-dried matter whether speech varieties are best considered dialects of "the same language" or not, and this is, in that sense, one of those cases. Hence my objection to the wording "Nahuatl dialect which happens to..." which blithely begs that question too. I think of Nawat as a language, not as a dialect-of, but that is not the point I wish to make; the point I wish to make is that this point of view is one legitimate way of understanding what it is, and the wording quoted seems to want to make that viewpoint illegitimate.
In short, I could have said nothing and just edit the sentence in question and just go ahead and put this in its place: "A different (though related) language spoken in El Salvador is also called Nawat...", and that would be at least as correct as: "Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name, is spoken as far south as El Salvador". We could even have a reversion war over it. But I don't want that; what I'm asking for is some balance, i.e. not making something sound like an airtight fact when it is only one way of looking at things. -- A R King ( talk) 19:41, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for coming back and for the revision in the article. I have made two changes: to correct "southern most" to "southernmost" (orthographic), and "as far south as El Salvador" -> "in El Salvador", partly for style (to avoid "southernmost...as far south"), and because the sentence is in the present tense, and at present El Salvador is the only place Nawat/Pipil is spoken anyway, so I think that makes it clearer. Alan -- A R King ( talk) 20:56, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
I want to include a text sample and preferably also a sound sample of Nahuatl. If anyone has an idea of which text to use that would be good. I would like to have a short text that could be shown side by side in two or more dialects to illustrate the diversity. Also if anyone knows of a short sample recording of a Nahuatl native speaker (with free license) that would be good - I would prefer a recording that has already been released into the public domain. But if all else fails I'll use one of my own recordings. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 07:40, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Since I was asked by Maunus to review this article since I had worked a bit on Aztec cuisine and was at least a bit familiar with Aztec customs, I have one rather specific request. In the example of parallellisms, I'd love to see how maize was called "our flesh, our bones", since I recall reading that in Sophie D. Coe's book America's First Cuisines. Since maize was so central to Aztec mythology and society, I think it could very well replace "the chest, the box"
Peter Isotalo 14:01, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I've rather belatedly arrived to look at this article, after a request for review. I just want to endorse the GA decision. I concur on almost every point. My only disagreement is that I'm more lenient regarding whatever copyedit issues may have been in the mind of the editor who passed the article for GA. I've read a good proportion of the article at this stage. While it's style is not my own, I find it very pleasing indeed. In particular, vocabulary selection is clearly governed by the needs of a wide readership -- technical terms are used where, and only where, these are essential to description of the language. They are wikified so novices can learn their meaning, rather than creating digressions to explain what more experienced linguists are already familiar with. This is no mean feat, and a great credit to the editors who have compiled the article.
I am particularly pleased with the references. These appear to be the core standard reference works on the subject. As with technical vocabulary, selection of references shows a wise judgement on the part of the author(s) as to just how much detail should be provided.
I am thrilled to learn a little about the tl phoneme, as my naive impression of meso-american languages was that they were full of this distinctive sound. There are a couple of brief discussions of debate in the literature regarding this, and the most helpful reference is identified. Perhaps I will locate this reference at some time when I have liesure. It is a wonderful thing that Wiki provides a platform for experts to direct amateurs like me to the best sources to inform my curiosity.
I will close by repeating my praise of the quality of prose in this entry. The logical flow between and within sections, the steady cadence of simple sentences with supporting subordinate clauses and, above all, the user-friendly vocabulary choice make this a very readable article. If a reader has sufficient interest in the topic to engage, she will not find herself put off by the style of its prose.
I will keep reading, for the sake of my own education, and copyedit where I think appropriate. However, I think this article is so good already that it needs the FA process for possible further improvement. Only by explicitly hearing the competing demands of many fussy readers can we really know how to modify what has been contributed to satisfy the highest possible standards available to Wiki. Alastair Haines ( talk) 01:09, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
I tried to move the infobox reference to the list of ISO codes into iso3 (=ISO 639-3). Those are not the iso2 (ISO 639-2) codes, as the pre-current version made it seem. I tried various configurations, and finally saved one of the more innocuous-looking ones. I have no idea *why* it insists on generating two references to the list where I only put one. I'd be delighted if somebody could fix it. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 15:27, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
Excellent solution. Thanks! -- Lavintzin ( talk) 21:34, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
-My changes to your changes-
(to Lavintzin:) I have recently undone or changed a few of your edits to Nahuatl and I feel I should explain my reasons for doing so. You changed the gloss to an example of a Nahuatl sentence with agreement markers to four participants - you correctly stated that te:- and tla- are non specific prefixes referring to "someone" and "something" and not to "him" and "it" as the gloss staed. The gloss however were from Suárez' book "The Mesoamerican Indian Languages" and I believe he used the gloss he did in order to show the possibilities for polypersonal headmarking in Nahuatl. While your gloss is undoubtedly more correct I feel that we should use the gloss used in the example so as not to be guilty of neither misrepresenting quotes or doing Original Research. Your other change introduced a very good and thorough explanation of the gloss of an example of a modern Nahuatl sentence that had various loaned words. However it was a bit too detailed for the scope of the section and I moved it into a footnote. I hope that you can agree with my reasoning for changing your edits, and if not I am quite ready to discuss how to do it in a better way. I hope I haven't discouraged you from adding any more of your high quality contributions to the article. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 15:26, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't like calling things like -pan relational nouns. What's nominal about them?
They have been called postpositions by many people, and that makes sense: they are like prepositions except they come after their object. Some only occur with pronominal objects (and may optionally have a noun or independent pronoun corresponding to that object fore or aft: there is no reason beyond a priori fiat to say that the overt prefixal object is just an inflected copy of a "real" phrasal object.) Other postpositions only occur with nominal stems as objects (the "locatives" as they are often called), and yet others can occur with either type of object. fwiw the name "relational noun" is also used by some to talk about nouns like father or aunt or lid (clearly nouns, but equally clearly denoting a prominent, defining relation to the designated thing).
Many postpositions are built of a noun along with a postposition or two (e.g. -kua-pa-k 'head-on-loc' 'on top of'. But so are many prepositions in other languages (e.g. on top of, be-side, under-neath, etc.) and we don't feel the need to call those relational nouns.
Languages like Mixtec that actually use an underived noun for this sort of purpose have more reason to adopt the term. E.g. they might say 'it happened eye me' for 'in my presence', but in Nahuatl you say -īx-pan, not just -īx.
Bottom line, I know people call these things by the name "relational nouns", but I would rather the Wiki article on Nahuatl not make it seem like that's the standard or maybe even the only way they're talked about.
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 00:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
- The pronominal postpositional objects are formally identical to possessives, yes. But their meaning is not the same as possessive prefixes' meanings generally are. (That's not a strong argument as stated, but it can easily be made stronger.) What other nominal morphology do the postp/rel-n's have? Not absolutive. (Of course they don’t when they have a pronominal prefix, assuming that's a possessive prefix. But they also don't have it when the object is a noun stem, even though N-N-abs is perfectly standard. If you say those nouns are possessors, then why don't real nouns take such possessors?) No plurals, possessed or otherwise. No collectives. Dim/honorific, but often in the wrong place: _before_ the postposition. And of course verbs take the dim-hon also. Nothing else particularly nouny that I can think of.
I wonder how secure the nominal etymologies of most of them are. But that's a side issue, really.
Anyhow, as you say, there are divergent interpretations. So I agree, this should be mentioned in the article. I'm not asking to exclude the idea that they are/might be nouns of some sort. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 07:01, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
That's not a very strong argument. In at least some variants the same could be said of verbs and their clausal objects. It's easy enough to see it as a general rule that nominals corresponding to a pronominal object or possessor come next to the word in which that pronominal form occurs, except in a few special cases, and may occur either before or after (depending on the variant)... What noun did -ka come from? What did it mean? What noun did -wan come from? Anyway, the whole way of looking at it raises more questions than it provides answers. To my mind the only question it answers is "Why do the pronominal OP's have the same form as the pronominal possessors?" And I can answer that question without having to posit that the P's are nouns.
Probably this discussion is getting less relevant to the Nahuatl page. If we want to continue it one of our talk pages might be better.
Cheers!-- Lavintzin ( talk) 14:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm changing a bunch of things in the noun article, including putting a separate section for pronouns and moving the inclusive/exclusive stuff there.
One thing I'm deleting for the present at least is the following:
Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects also use a special locative suffix [1] which can be described as a locative case.
What special locative suffix is this? How is it different from the other ones? If this is to go back in, I think it needs to be clearer.
In any case the tie-in between these structures and case markings is not close (though it is real. So is the tie-in between say English prepositional phrases and case markings.) One normally expects case markings to distinguish subjects and objects, not things like "in place of" from "between" or "underneath". To me it makes sense to downplay the identification of these constructions with case.
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 14:40, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
It's in the modern variants I know too. But I don't see it as all that different from -pan, -kan, -tlan, etc. They all mean more or less "(at the) place of __", and little else. Cases like -nawak, -tzallan, -kuapak, -tenko, -ixpan add a little more information about the kind of place, by including a noun giving a good hint to that information. Anyway, I should read what Launey says about why he thinks it's so different in Classical. It is one of the few that only goes on noun stems, not permitting the pronominal prefixes to be used. -tlan is similar in some dialects at least.
Anyhow, I agree not to put it in unless there is considerably more explanation as to what Launey is proposing and why. It's probably not best to do that for a general article such as this. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 23:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
predicate
hidalgo
Randomblue (
talk)
10:53, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
In the "Modern period" section, in the map Image:Nahuatl dialects map.png the whole Sierra de Zongolica area in Central Veracruz is omitted. There is a big white blob in northern Oaxaca, and there are indeed a few Nahuatl-speaking towns there, but the Zongolica area is very large and populous in comparison. (I have a map made from the INALI map of the area that I could send whoever (Maunus, I suppose?) "owns" this map, so it could be adapted.)
-- Lavintzin ( talk) 17:20, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
I feel the small paragraph there and example could use tweaking. The example is a bit atypical, given that the -tsinoa suffix is used only of verb whose normal construction is reflexive: the normal honorific is a form (usually a reflexive) where the subject is "doubled". Circeus ( talk) 16:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
is putting .ogg media files for the pronuciation of native terms something that's encouraged for every article? or only for difficultly-spelled names? CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 01:08, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Oh my! A front page article which is manifestly wrong just by clicking on the links in the first paragraph? Why on earth does it say that all Uto-Aztecan languages are native to Mesoamerica? --
Aaron Walden
21:46, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
The article, as implemented, addresses two separate topics, the nahuan family of languages, and central Mexican Nahuatl. I'd like to suggest that these need to be split into separate articles, and that the Nahuan family info needs to be significantly enhanced, with links to articles on the family members. As it stands, the classical nahuatl info is fantastic, but I'm left wondering about all the other nahuan dialects, how they're related, when they split, etc. Don't get me started on Pipil...It would be nice to see more from the linguists about the other family members, and I think that entails splitting the article. Rsheptak ( talk) 18:15, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I was off the Internet for a few days and (bummer!) missed seeing Nahuatl on the front page on the 13th. Anyway, congratulations to us all, and especially to you, Maunus. I hope somebody who knows how to handle the barnstar thing gives you a couple! You done good. -- Lavintzin ( talk) 05:45, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
When discussing the arising of a language area, the word "converge" is an overstatement. A relatively small number of traits diffuse to the languages in the area -- that does not amount to "convergence" of the languages.
The standard citation punctuation is YYYY:[page numbers]. This is not only standard (particularly in linguistics), but it is obviously shorter than YYYY, pp. [page numbers]. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:40, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I am not against changing the citation style- but I suggest we hear other editors about it first since the article has been subject to extensive review already and this citation style was kept throughout. ·Maunus·ƛ· 09:01, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I notice instantly subtle errors of lexical collocation and use of commas that give away that this prose was largely composed by a nonnative. I will do what I can to rectify this.
To change the subject, some of the phrasings are tortuous and/or logically ill formed (like the sentence on Pipil arising from migrants to Central America which I have already edited, just minutes ago), so those interested in this article should rectify them too. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:48, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I am astonished at the consistent use of redundant indications in the citations, like "see", "consult", "for discussion of". Granted, this was once common practice in U.S. academic literature -- decades ago. Dale Chock ( talk) 07:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the article up till now misrepresented the scholarship as to the use of "Aztecan" for the name of a branch of Uto-Aztecan. Although I recognize that "Aztecan" is increasingly being replaced by "Nahuan", including by Campbell in his authoritative American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, the article doesn't demonstrate that the replacement is well established. I am not taking sides, I'm just addressing the matter of guiding people's research. You're supposed to give researchers a hint as to what terminology is the most prevalent. When they search literature from before the year 1990 at least, they're going to encounter "Aztecan".
If somebody wants to restore the use of the term "Nahuan", I'm pretty open to it -- especially if you defend within the article that "Aztecan" is rapidly being abandoned. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Two leading specialists, Langacker and Campbell, proposed in 1978 that Pochutec was not a variety of "Nahuatl", but rather a sister language to Nahuatl's ancestor. This proposal has gained acceptance over the ensuing three decades -- but the article gave no acknowledgement of this! Instead it presented that Pochutec was a variety of Nahuatl -- which ignores the stance of two of the references, Macri and Looper 2003 and Campbell and Langacker 1978a. I have inserted the appropriate mention, then correspondingly deleted all statements that identify Pochutec as falling under Proto-Nahuatl. By the way, speaking of "1978a", you're supposed to cite articles that form a series separately, not just give a single citation for the series. I'm about to correct that too. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
revert; pochutec is nahuan according to canger and lastra which are more authoritative and recent than campbell and looper macri on the internal classification of nahuan.
The crucial difference between Whorf, Lastra, and Campbell and Langacker on the one hand and Hasler on the other resides in their view on Pochutec: the former treat it as a separate branch coordinate with some dialect or stage from which all the other Nahuatl dialects have developed.
Campbell and Langacker's study contains two points of importance for the classification of Nahuatl dialects-the first concerning the position of Pochutec and the second treating the history of A in Nahuatl. Actually, most scholars have agreed that Pochutec constitutes a separate branch of Proto-Aztecan coordinate with a second branch from which all other Nahuatl dialects have developed, but Campbell and Langacker are the first to have presented detailed and systematic arguments in favor of this position of Pochutec. Dakin has since argued against their most important claims, namely, [their reconstruction of the Proto-Aztecan vowel phoneme inventory -- Dale] . . . . However, she agrees with them that "Pochutec in all respects is still an extremely divergent dialect and probably should be separated from the rest of Aztecan as Campbell and Langacker have done" (1983:202).
. . . . In other words, so far the only hypothesis based on Pochutec evidence that has received wide acceptance is that Pochutec "is parallel to all the other Aztec dialects and languages as can be shown in a branching diagram" (Campbell and Langacker 1978:98).
This is a rebuttal of CJLL Wright's (or cjllw) first set of comments -- especially the factual claims -- from 31 Dec. 2008, 16:23. I proceed in Wright's sequential order.
1. "not to launch into a series of major changes". There were no major changes. CJLL in leaping to the defense of a longtime collaborator perhaps has not read my edits so as to judge for himself whether the changes were major. The only significant content edit I made was one whose significance was minor. Namely, I made explicit the existence of a certain proposal on the relation of Pochutec with Nahuan (Aztecan) and I made it explicit that the question is to be regarded as open. (I will quote this edit below.)
2. Words by CJLL to the effect that Dale should bear in mind that Maunus is not the writer of everything Dale is criticizing. CJLL is in effect misquoting me (although his allegation is in the form of an insinuation).
a. In creating each of four new headings, I have not mentioned anyone's name. I have only stated Maunus' name when addressing his edit summaries and Talk page remarks. So it is not I who is carelessly attributing material to editor X when I reply to X, it is CJLL who carelessly assumes that everything I say while replying to X addresses X specifically. Read my words, not just the words of your buddies, longtime collaborators X, Y, and Z.
b. I had already realized that there must be multiple editors of this article for whom English is a second language.
3. "Maunus quite politely and reasonably asked". Please look at the contrast between the mildness and reasonableness of my little one sentence edit about Pochutec versus how Maunus abruptly -- and inaccurately -- dismissed the position contrary to his as a "fringe viewpoint". Maunus's hostility to acknowledging a certain proposal about one language (Pochutec) is way out of proportion to the intrinsic importance of the subject (aside from being academically improper).
4. "I do not see anywhere where Maunus has said the Pochutec matter is "100% proven". Well, in that case let me summarize what I have already written here.
a. About the Pochutec question, I added the following to the article: "The proposal of Campbell and Langacker in the 1970s that Pochutec -- a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century -- is coordinate with all other Aztecan dialects (that it was the first to split off from Proto-Aztecan) has gained currency. [2]". Does anyone still fault either the academic neutrality or the tone of this?
b. Maunus deleted the above (go here to compare the versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Nahuatl&diff=260893271&oldid=260874326) with the justification that it's a "fringe viewpoint" (he wrote that 15:48, 30 December 2008 under this same Talk page heading, "Pochutec"). But as I have explained on this Talk page, it is instead closer to being the mainstream position.
c. Maunus defended his claim in part by citing (but not quoting from) Canger 1988 but -- again as I have elaborated on -- Canger 1988 contradicts Maunus.
d. Here's new information bearing on the "fringe viewpoint" accusation: Suarez 1983 also accepts the allegedly "fringe" proposal ("the historically attested Nahua language group and its closest relative Pochutec" -- i.e., Po is a relative of Na, not a variety of Na). Even better: Suarez wrote this in the very next sentence after a claim that appears in the article's lead ("Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD."); see Suarez 1983:149 (original hardbound edition, five pages into §10.1). Granted Maunus may not be the one who put that in the lead, but as CJLL asserts, Maunus has been "the mainstay contributor" of this Nahuatl article (an assumption I had not made myself). Not only that, but Maunus with all his specialist training (see his personal page) would know Suarez 1983 well -- it's a survey of the languages of that part of the world published by an old linguist writing about his area of expertise, and Suarez 1983 is in the bibliography. J.A. Suarez, Canger, Campbell, Langacker -- this is not a grouping that generates "fringe" proposals about Nahuatl or the Nahuan branch! (Campbell and Langacker are the originators of the proposal Maunus doesn't want to see mentioned in the article, while Suarez and Canger have repeated the proposal unskeptically.)
5. Here's what I have to say in defense of my belittling tone.
a. The prose is pretty bad in places and there are howler inaccuracies -- months after the article attains Featured status. CJLL complains about newcomer me barging in on a longtime group -- then why didn't you collectively catch these flaws yourselves over so many years?
b. Maunus's rebuttals were careless. He has confused "Nahuan" with "Nahuatl" at least twice (a distinction he obviously understands, but he slips up anyway); to repeat, a paper he claimed supported his opinion actually contradicted it. Maunus still hasn't quoted from the one scholar left among his citations who might support his position (I refer to Y. Lastra de Suarez, not to be confused with J.A. Suarez).
c. The footnote formatting is so naive it really should be beneath the dignity of people with master's degrees.
In conclusion, one can readily see why I would feel that the gist of CJLL's intervention was to dwell only on sensational aspects of some (some) of my remarks (the part CJLL was not too busy to read) and ignore every substantive thing I had written in the preceding 24 hours or so. Dale Chock ( talk) 00:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Under this major heading, yesterday, Maunus asserted that classifying Pochutec outside of Nahuatl is a "fringe viewpoint". I have already rebutted that statement, but the story of the rebuttal gets better and better. I just read the article General Aztec. Two and a half years ago, an editor who is a current and longtime contributor to both that article and this one (and who is a "practicing linguist" to boot) made this edit to General Aztec:
All these dialectal areas constitute what may be called General Aztec or Nahuatl proper: it is generally accepted that Pochutec (now extinct) is different enough from all of these to warrant being counted as a sister Nahuan language to General Aztec.
This entire sentence survives in that article as the concluding sentence of its lead. Well, that is the viewpoint that Maunus condemns as "fringe", and deleted my modestly phrased edit on Pochutec to this article. Well, Maunus is another current and longtime contributor to that article too. Yet the Talk page of General Aztec contains no discussion of this issue, the relation of Pochutec within the Nahuan branch (also called the Aztecan branch). Dale Chock ( talk) 02:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
I reacted somewhat brusquely because you were introducing substantial changes to a long stable high quality article without discussion but with a lot of disparaging and actually quite offensive, arrogant remarks. My reversal of your edit was not a rejection of its factauality but a request for discussion and consenus before making substantial changes. You should know that I am not the only lingiuist working proifessionally with uto-aztecan language who has contributed substantially to this article otrhers include User:Lavintzin, User:Taivo and User:AlanRKing and when I asked for you to wait it was their thoughts I was hoping to hear on the issue. However I don't get a feeling that you are intrerested in colaboration , and I also have to say that I dont really feel like collaborating with someone displaying your arrogant attitude. So for now do what you want with the articles, I have neither the time, internet acces, or book resources to argue with you. For what its worth I admit that I was wrong about Pochutec (I reacted to quick)- which is a sister to the nahuan group of the aztecan languages. That is not fringe. I was thinking about Pipil/Nawat that was also classified as a branch unto itself by Campbell but included in peripheral dialects by Lastra/Canger (I thought about this because it is a discussion we have had here before). Macri and Looper however is not a good resource for genetic relationships since their agenda is strictly to prove that nahuat was spoken in mesoamerica in the classic period (which IS a fringe viewpoint) - use references dealing with uto-aztecan genealogy for claims about genealogy. Go ahead & happy editing. ·Maunus·ƛ· 16:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
In reviewing this article over the last 18 hours or so, I have seen that the formatting of citations is incorrect and unsophisticated. But to discuss corrections to footnotes turns out to beg a question: what is the proper genre for this entry, and for WP entries generally? Editors have been composing this article not like an encyclopedia entry, but like a scholarly monograph. Of course, the same is true of many WP entries. An encyclopedia entry would be more impersonal (i.e., have fewer overt mentions of scholars' names) and it would summarize more. So I see the need to question how much we want to let this trend continue at Wikipedia.
It's not clear to me that we would want to reverse this trend:
But for now, I suggest to past editors of this article that it is now bogged down in details and that the style should be less of a review article and more of a summary -- like you'd find in encyclopedias, including encyclopedias of linguistics. (The entries in encyclopedias for academicians do, of course, contain mentions of scholars' names in the body of the entry, but sparingly.)
I will conclude with miscellaneous tutorial remarks on footnotes.
[1] As to the cumbersomeness I have objected to, I realize that it is still in vogue in some fields of academia (I have philosophy journals in mind). However, streamlined footnotes are quite common and are predominant in linguistics, and not just in linguistics. I find it ironic that we have an editor who disregarded the formatting used in one of the papers he has had the greatest confidence in (Canger 1988 in IJAL). Incidentally, I see that IJAL's current style requirements have a slight change: use a comma to separate the author name and the year. I don't see a virtue in this, but it doesn't bother me terribly, either.
[2] I can't believe people could spend days and weeks reading through academic monographs and not notice footnotes like "Smith 1995a", "Smith 1995b" (especially when the footnotes are literally not foot notes, but are embedded in the text). This is what academics do when they cite multiple works by the same worker from the same year. In the case of this entry on Nahuatl, it's cleaner to cite "Campbell and Langacker 1978b:83" than "Campbell and Langacker 1978 (Part II:83)". Besides, the multiple works rarely form a thematic series (as they did in this case). And what if some of the multiple works formed a thematic series and others didn't? Dale Chock ( talk) 03:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been able to get hands on some of my materials that I have not had acces to since Dale Chock drastically altered the classification scheme for Pochutec and Nahuan in general based on his understanding of Canger, Lastra, Campbell & Langacker and Dakin. It seems that his interpretation is at odds at least with that of Dakin who wrote in 2001 in the article "Estudios sobre el náhuatl" in Avances y balances de lenguas yutoaztecas, (Published by Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia ISBN: 970-18-6966-4.) (This book was published exactly as a statement of the current status of Uto-Aztecan studies and contains contributions from most of the premier scholars in the field):
Dakin then proceeds to draw up a classification scheme that she states follows the classifications of Lastra and Canger that counts Pipil among the eastern dialects and Pochutec among the western dialects. This seems to mean either that Karen Dakin suffers from the same misunderstandings of the classification of nahuan languages that yours truly did until Dale chock came around and corrected it or that in fact the page previously reflected the scholarly consensus better when it classified Pochutec as a Nahuan language classifiable with dialects of the the western periphery. Furthermore Dakin directly contradicts Dale chocks notion that Canger and Lastras classification of a centre and eastern/western peripheries is not historically based and explains the exact nature of the historical relationship citing the same papers that I have cited and which Dale Chock has cited to the opposite effect. think it is time to bring back the classification scheme that was in place before Dale Chock appeared out of nowehere with his novel interpretations of old data. ·Maunus·ƛ· 18:31, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
I was going to put somthing into the article about how in prisons some/many of the Mexican gang members are learning Nahuatl language. I have no source for this information besides blog posts. Is there anyone who can find verification for this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.85.234.27 ( talk) 01:52, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I saw something about it on a History Channel show on Mexican gangs...but I'm unable to find anything right now. Batteryram ( talk) 19:23, 2 October 2010 (UTC)Batteryram
There is no need for a hatnote reference to the reggae DJ Rudy Grant, one of whos stage names is "the mexicano". If any redirect to him is necessary it will be from a disambiguation page at Mexicano redirecting simulataneously to Rudy Grant, Nahuatl and all other possible uses of the word Mexicano. There is no justiofication for marring and FA with a reference to an ubscure Dj with a marginally similar nickname. ·Maunus·ƛ· 16:56, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Were there ever any radio stations with programs in the Nahuatl language? Dexter Nextnumber ( talk) 22:28, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Is Tla from Tla as in Something or from the root word meaning to speak.
Nahuatl would be the next word. is it used as in language or as in to speak.
Where is til from?
I'm completely lost on Panoloani? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.15.116.90 ( talk) 15:41, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
An anonymous editor is changing the phonology table to present the phonology of the dialect of MEcayapan. This is a bad idea for several reasons. The mecayapan dialect is just one dialect of many and there is no reason to privilege it over other dialects - some of which have many more speakers. This issue is avoided by choosing an historical dialect. Secondly the mecayapan dialect is not very representive it has undergone many changes that are particular to it and are not found in any other dialects. The choice of Classical Nahuatl also avoids this problem as it has a phonology that is quite similar to a majority of modern dialects (except a majority of modern dialects have h instead of glottal stop) - and many of the modern dialects that are not similar to classical nahuatl have evolved from stage where they were similar within the past centuries. Thirdly the rest of the article uses Classical Nahuatl phonology as a reference for description of the particular phonologies of other dialects - this means that we can not just change the phonology table without changing the entire article's prose to reflect that change. ·Maunus·ƛ· 19:53, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
When you go to this page, it says "'Mexican language' redirects here." That's not true; "Mexican language" redirects to "Languages of Mexico." Should the {redirect} be removed from this page, or should "Mexican language" be changed to redirect to "Nahuatl"? Zaxius ( talk) 21:26, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
The way some parts of the article are phrased now is advertedly or inadvertedly discriminatory. When the article says that nahuatl "is a group of related languages and dialects", it is giving inaccurate information and being unadvertedly racist. If we were to say that Nahuatl is a group of dialects, then we would have to say the same thing for ALL languages. A dialect is but the regional variety of a language. In that sense ALL human beings who speak a language, speak a dialect. There is nobody who speaks only a language and speaks no dialect. Having said that, why is it deemed important to point out that NAHUATL IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, and not say the same thing for every other language e.g. ENGLISH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, SPANISH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, FRENCH IS A GROUP OF DIALECTS, etc. The reason might be because there is a colonial tradition of making a distinction between (civilized) languages and (primitive) dialects -the parentheses here are meant to point out the underlying belief behind. Spanish or English, for example, have a really big dialectal variability, and a person from Cuba might really not be understood by someone in Argentina, or someone from a peasant community in Guerrero, México might not be understood at all by a Spaniard. The speech of someone speaking "English" in Jamaica is really far away from the speech of a Texan or a middle class student in Vancouver... Like I said, there is really no objectivity in saying that "Náhuatl is a group of dialects".
Now... having said that. I also don't know why would it be written here that Nahuatl is a group of related "LANGUAGES". Nahuatl IS A LANGUAGE, not a group of LANGUAGES. The linguistic family from which nahuatl comes is called Yutonahuatl, or Yuto-Aztecan. This latter indeed can be said to be "a group of languages", which includes "Cora" "Huichol" and many other North American languages. But NAHUATL IS NOT A GROUP OF LANGUAGES. A nahuatl speaker in Guerrerro understands and communicates with a nahuatl speaker in Veracruz or Puebla. Yes... with some difficulty, depending on the level of variation, but the language is only one (just like in the examples I gave earlier about English or Spanish). There is literature being produced, music, grammar analyses, symposiums, etc., in and about the Nahuatl language. There is really no basis for saying that Nahuatl is a group of related languages; if anything, one could stretch it and argue that this issue is not yet resolved, and that is being still debated by linguistics, but in that case, the vast consensus is that NAHUATL is A LANGUAGE, not a dialect, not a group of dialects, not a group of languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.156.20.98 ( talk) 02:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
This article is a total mess with regards to the language/dialect issue. Obviously, the division between these terms is often more political than linguistic, but many people seem to agree that a good metric is mutual intelligibility, which would dictate that Nahuatl is a family of at least a handful of languages, rather than a single language.
At least let's make up our minds... there are lines of this article that talk about Nahuatl dialects, Nahuan languages, and Nahuan varieties all referring to the same thing. Parts of this article claim that Pipil is a dialect of the Nahuatl language, while others claim that Pipil is a language in the Nahuan language family.
To the commenter above: when we start having to write separate books for English vs Australian English, or Cuban vs Mexican Spanish, then you can compare the Nahuatl situation... you do realize that speakers from La Huasteca region cannot understand written (or spoken) materials prepared in the Nahuatl variety Guerrero, and vice-versa (the two most spoken varieties, I believe)? Literate Spanish speakers can understand almost any modern text written in another Spanish-speaking country. The difference between some Nahuatl varieties is more akin to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, maybe even Spanish and Italian - you can definitely recognize a lot of words, and maybe know what general topic is being discussed, but without learning the other variety, you can't actually know what people are saying.
Also, this has to be the only language article on Wikipedia that flips back and forth between referring to a classical language and its modern descendants, often without clarifying which is being discussed...
The reason I bring all this up here rather than just changing it myself is that I think we should discuss the options. Should some material be moved to Classical Nahuatl? Should we refer to Nahuatl varieties as languages? How can we continue to refer to them as "dialects", when plenty of reliable sources treat them as separate languages, and they are mutually unintelligible?
-- ಠ_ಠ node.ue ಠ_ಠ ( talk) 08:42, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I really found the External Link section of the article to be very helpful in allowing me to become very familiar with the morphology of the Nahualt language. My instructor for my linguistics class gave us a variety of links to help us become familiar with different american indian languages. I came across a great page that is perfect for introductory students such as myself and I would like to know if anyone believes a link should be added to the External Link section that will redirect someone to the following page, http://www.native-languages.org/nahuatl.htm. I believe this page would be a great asset to this section because the site has wonderful example of vocabulary and literature. The website also has links to many dictionaries, audiotapes and language resources. Please let me know what you think. Lasotelo101 ( talk) 04:38, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
I removed the following external links from the section, so that we might have a discussion about which links to include and which not. WP:EL is quite specific to avoid link farms with links that are not specifically helpful to reader, so let us have a discussion about this.
I've just revamped the refs, changing to harvard refs and introducing some new ones. I also reorganized the article to keep internal and external classification together and avoid repetition and redundancy. I want to make sure the references are up to date, but I am wondering if the article text itself may need an update to become more useful. Any opinions about how the grammar section may be improved? As Node ue ( talk · contribs) pointed out above the article is a hub for articles about the different varieties and we need to strike a balance between demonstrating the fact of diversity and give coherent information. Input and suggestions are invited. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:04, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi, We have this issue that we really do not know how to deal with and were hoping an expert could come help us on our quest for truth.
/info/en/?search=Talk:Marijuana_(word)#Nahuatl_Clarification
Thank you -- Potguru ( talk) 02:53, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
Lacrimosus ( talk · contribs): 1. Whether or not it is an adverb or a noun as in English is irrelevant - translation of does not require the translation to use the same wordclass. 2. the translation given of mexicacopa clearly translates it as an adverbial phrase, so the reader is not mislead to believe that it is a noun. 3. I know of no instances of mexicatlahtolli being used to describe the language in colonial Nahuatl - if anything it was called Nahuatlahtolli. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:30, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
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I fixed an error in the article GlottalStop777 ( talk) 14:36, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
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targetsThere are many harv citation target warnings remaining in the featured article. I corrected a few errors in the sources and a corresponding sfn. More await attention. I am available sporadically and will certainly return. It’d be great if an interested editor beat me to it. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 03:17, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Hello everyone,
Just FYI, I will be making a recording of this article for the Spoken Articles project and will upload it soon.
Regards, Nelson (Jarabe tapatio)
Only Sahagún is mentioned as an author, but we know the names of other authors: Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, and Mateo Severino. - Francis Tyers · 23:10, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
On this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl The video: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/WIKITONGUES-_Javier_speaking_Nahuatl_%26_Spanish.webm First of all, Nahuatl is a second language to me.The person "Javier" is not speaking nahuatl. He is not a speaker of the language. He is an "Aztec Dancer". Notice the necklace and ear gauges which are not Nahua. His chant is not in Nahuatl but rather is from the Native American church from the USA. He then sings in spanish while mixing in some very commonly known nahuatl words that everyone knows in Mexico but are no longer indigenous concepts but recreating Aztec stereotypes by city people. You can find hundreds of videos of actual native people that speak Nahuatl as their native language or even students and professors who speak it as a second language. This video does not show a person speaking Nahuatl. It would be like a video showing a person doing a buddist chant then singing in Chinese and mixing common words in english like "House", "Family", and "Jesus Christ". Then you'd put "here is a person speaking english!" I hope you understand what I'm saying and remove the video because it's mislabeled and wrong. Thank you. Aztlanow ( talk) 19:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)