The Online Nahuatl Dictionary: A Model for Interdisciplinary Multicultural Collaboration

Nahuatl, one of the world's indigenous languages, is facing
serious threats to its survival. Unjust rural land use
patterns, the lure of perceived urban employment opportunities,
and lingering colonial prejudices are but some of the factors
contributing to the rapid loss of the Nahuatl language in
highland central Mexico today. Classical Nahuatl, as it was
written and spoken until about 1800, is already extinct. At the
end of the eighteenth century native scribes and notaries who
were proficient in written Nahuatl had shifted to the use of
written Spanish, the language of the colonizers. Nahuatl became
an oral language, and fewer and fewer Nahua individuals were
able to read the thousands of manuscripts written in Nahuatl
(using the Roman alphabet, after about 1540) their forebears
had left on archive shelves. The Online Nahuatl Dictionary
project proposes a resource to help reverse these trends: a
reference for modern Nahuas and other interested parties to
gain access to the indigenous language, Classical and modern,
for self-education or other scholarly purposes.
This trilingual dictionary project (Nahuatl, Spanish, and
English) has many facets. It involves the participation of an
institute in Zacatecas, Mexico, where John Sullivan, a teacher
of Spanish and Nahuatl recruits Nahua university students from
the Huasteca region. These students receive training in written
Nahuatl (Classical and modern) and Spanish and collaborate
in the building of the dictionary, entering terms from their
current, everyday speech. They are also entering sixteenth and
seventeenth-century Nahuatl vocabularies compiled by Spanish
priests and their informants, entering them into the dictionary
database. Finally, they are taking courses in cultural history,
paleography, and linguistics, which help prepare them for their
Classical Nahuatl manuscript studies.
The plan is to obtain funding (we have applied for the
NEH/NSF grant Documenting Endangered Languages) to
underwrite a larger number of scholarships, to expand the
student body and diversify it, inviting the participation of
Nahuas from additional regions. This, in turn, will diversify
the dictionary base, with vocabulary, pronunciation variations,
and broadening perspectives from places such as the modern
state of Guerrero. It will also help spread a Nahuatl literacy
movement to different parts of the country. It will prepare more
people to better understand their histories by studying
manuscripts from their communities of the past. These various
students will not be consultants or human subjects but rather
full participants in the project.
The dictionary project also involves the participation of
ethnohistorians at the University of Oregon, Stephanie Wood
and Robert Haskett, who have training in Classical Nahuatl.
Wood and Haskett have considerable experience translating
manuscripts and have access to additional colleagues working
in the same field. They are selecting terminology and contextual
information from recent manuscript translations and are adding
this material to the dictionary, with full citations that will point
philologists back to the original sources. They enter terms just
as they find them in the original manuscripts, capturing a range
of orthographic variation, but they also include in the database
any known standardized versions to facilitate the greatest
possible success for searching. (Because of the diverse ways
of writing Nahuatl, we often lack a single lemma that all would
agree upon as a universal dictionary form.) Wood and Sullivan
will also be adding a linguistically marked-up rendition of each
word, showing vowel length and glottal stops, for instance, in
order to facilitate linguists’ searches and research needs. They
will follow the markup used in Frances Karttunen’s Analytical
Dictionary of Nahuatl (1983).
Sullivan, Wood, and Haskett will work together, in consultation
with linguists such as Frances Karttunen, Johnathan Amith,
and other colleagues in Mexico, to ensure that the English and
Spanish-language search interfaces for the dictionary will meet
the interests of multiple disciplines. Luis Reyes García, who
recently passed away, was a model Nahua scholar who led
translation workshops in Mexico City and Tlaxcala that we
wish to emulate. One of his students, Raul Macuil, and another
Nahua college graduate, Ignacio Silva Cruz, in Mexico City,
are ready to help us test our materials. Sullivan and Wood will
open up dialogue between the student and faculty groups and
encourage a growing appreciation for what each is contributing.
Sullivan will additionally guide the Nahua students in building
the Nahuatl-language search interface.
The Nahuatl interface will be accessible from the trilingual
dictionary home page but it will also work as a stand-alone site,
as a monolingual dictionary aimed at modern speakers. The
intent is to encourage written literacy and to document current vocabularies and word meanings. It will help modern speakers
recapture terms from Classical Nahuatl that have been lost,
whether this might result in an expanded vocabulary in
modern-day usage or only an aid to help with translating cultural
heritage materials. Although there will be an emphasis on the
written language, the Nahuatl portion of the dictionary will
nevertheless offer users access to audio files, as well. Sound
recordings will serve to preserve and document regional
differences in pronunciation and provide access to
vision-impaired users and to those who are still building their
literacy.
As we are proposing it, the Online Nahuatl Dictionary project
offers a unique model for interdisciplinary work that will help
preserve an endangered indigenous language and, at the same
time, create some of the tools needed for the analysis of
neglected cultural heritage materials. It will bring together
modern language consultants with linguists and ethnohistorians
of various cultures (Spanish-speaking and English-speaking,
to start) to document a rapidly disappearing language, reinstate
a lost literacy for Nahuas, and establish a methodology for
international and cross-cultural collaboration in both dictionary
creation and manuscript transcription, translation, and analysis.
Our project has created an online environment for this
international collaboration, allowing native students to work
with native and non-native professors in building a multifaceted
reference database of the Nahuatl Language. This resource can
then be leveraged to provide features that will serve the
participants’ multiple purposes while simultaneously forging
a relationship of greater equality and respect. A key tool to help
facilitate this 'data collection' effort is the most recent version
of FileMaker Pro (Version 7.0) and its 'instant web publishing'
functionality. This technology gives us not only the flexibility
to allow any of the project participants to remotely enter data,
but also enables us to create various database interfaces on the
fly from anywhere via the internet. With the collaborative nature
of our project, this ability to alter the database and the various
interfaces through which different audiences interact with it is
crucial to addressing the needs of all the participants. In
addition, the use of this technology saves us the cost of
purchasing multiple database licenses, helps ensure the validity
of the data by having just one 'collection point' for information
and eases regular data backup. Furthermore, FileMaker Pro
7.0 supports the use of Unicode, facilitating the typing of special
characters that are so essential for written Nahuatl and Spanish
and handles audio files easily, allowing sound to be uploaded
from various locations.
Because the Online Nahuatl Dictionary is in the developmental
phase, our presentation for the ACH/ALLC will highlight our
goals and explore our intended methodology. We will appreciate
and benefit from suggestions from the audience. We see our
approach as unique in the way it combines linguistic with
humanities uses, in a distance research environment, to build
a lexicon that will document and preserve an endangered
language and help resurrect the voices of an extinct language.
Bibliography
Karttunen, Frances. Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl.
Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.